Related Experiment Video
Updated: Mar 21, 2026

Controlled Rotation of Human Observers in a Virtual Reality Environment
Published on: April 21, 2022
Steering chiral active Brownian motion via stochastic position-orientation resetting
1University of Vermont, Department of Physics, Burlington, Vermont 05405, USA.
Abstract:
Guiding active motion is important for targeted delivery, sensing, and search tasks. Many active systems exhibit circular swimming, ubiquitous in chemical, physical, and biological systems, that biases motion and reduces transport efficiency. We show that stochastic position-orientation resetting can overcome these limitations in two-dimensional chiral active Brownian particles by interrupting circular motion, resulting in tunable dynamics. When resets are infrequent compared to chiral rotation, the steady-state mean-squared displacement varies nonmonotonically with rotational diffusion. Steady-state excess kurtosis and orientation autocorrelation yields a spatiotemporal state diagram comprising three states: an activity-dominated chiral state and two resetting-dominated states with and without chiral rotation; in contrast, the achiral (or nonchiral) counterpart supports only the resetting-dominated state without chiral rotation. Chirality thus enriches the dynamical landscape, enabling tunable transitions between transport modes absent in achiral systems. A simple reset protocol can therefore transform chiral active dynamics and offer a practical strategy for optimizing search and transport in circle swimmers.
Related Concept Videos
Prochirality
Properties of Enantiomers and Optical Activity
Chirality in Nature
¹H NMR Chemical Shift Equivalence: Enantiotopic and Diastereotopic Protons
In chiral compounds such as 2-butanol, replacing the methylene hydrogens at C3 produces a pair of...
Molecules with Multiple Chiral Centers
Chirality
Chiral objects exhibit a sense of handedness when they interact with another chiral object. For example, our left foot can only fit in the left shoe and not in the right shoe. Achiral objects — objects that have...

