Regensburg 2025 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 13: Active Matter III (joint session DY/BP/CPP)
BP 13.4: Talk
Tuesday, March 18, 2025, 10:15–10:30, H47
Autonomous navigation in synthetic microswimmers: solving mazes with chemical echolocation — •Aritra K. Mukhopadhyay1, Linhui Fu2, Kai Feng2, Ran Niu2, and Benno Liebchen1 — 1Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany. — 2Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.
Motile microorganisms like bacteria and algae combine self-propulsion, cooperation, and decision-making at the micron scale. Inspired by these biological systems, synthetic microswimmers are emerging as human-made counterparts capable of self-propulsion. Recent breakthroughs provide a platform to integrate additional functionalities, bridging the gap between biology and synthetic systems.
We propose and experimentally demonstrate a mechanism enabling synthetic microswimmers, such as autophoretic colloids, droplet swimmers, and ion-exchange-driven modular swimmers, to make autonomous navigational decisions. These swimmers generate chemo-hydrodynamic signals that interact with boundaries, creating echoes that carry structural information about the environment. Remarkably, these echoes invoke automatic responses, such as synthetic chemotaxis, enabling the swimmers to avoid dead ends and autonomously find paths through complex mazes.
Our findings illustrate how simple physical principles can endow synthetic systems with advanced navigation functionalities, which could be useful for developing self-navigating micromachines with potential applications in targeted drug delivery and environmental sensing.
Keywords: active droplets; chemotaxis; maze solving; microswimmers