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Updated: Sep 23, 2026

Motility of Single Molecules and Clusters of Bi-Directional Kinesin-5 Cin8 Purified from S. cerevisiae Cells
Published on: February 2, 2022
Edge states, pairing, and sorting of motile chiral particles
Raushan Kant1, Ananyo Maitra2,3, A K Sood1
1Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Department of Physics, 560 012, India.
Abstract:
We present experiments on chiral active polar particles, realized as vibrated granular rods, revealing evidence for "skipping orbits" at hard boundaries. These classical edge states exhibit a net circulation opposite to the particles' intrinsic rotation and lead to a pronounced accumulation at the boundary, stronger than for their achiral counterparts. The directed nature of these orbits provides a simple yet high-fidelity mechanism for chiral sorting-even for solitary particles, unlike in [T. Barois et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 238003 (2020)0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.125.238003]. We propose a unified theoretical framework for boundary interactions of both chiral and achiral particles. In this model, an effective outward radial force, proportional to motility and chirality, explains the observed boundary-hugging. Our theory predicts, and our experiments confirm, a transition in the pairing of two particles of the same chirality, from apolar spinners to polar circle walkers, with increasing packing fraction of an ambient medium of beads.
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