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Updated: Sep 8, 2025

Monitoring Spatial Segregation in Surface Colonizing Microbial Populations
Published on: October 29, 2016
Dynamic clustering of passive colloids in dense suspensions of motile bacteria
Shreyas Gokhale1, Junang Li1, Alexandre Solon2
1Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
Abstract:
Mixtures of active and passive particles are predicted to exhibit a variety of nonequilibrium phases. Here we report a dynamic clustering phase in mixtures of colloids and motile bacteria. We show that colloidal clustering results from a balance between bond breaking due to persistent active motion and bond stabilization due to torques that align active particle velocity tangentially to the passive particle surface. Furthermore, dynamic clustering spans a broad regime between diffusivity-based and motility-induced phase separation that subsumes typical bacterial motility parameters.
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