Curling Liquid Crystal Microswimmers: A Cascade of Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking.

We report curling self-propulsion in aqueous emulsions of common mesogenic compounds. Nematic liquid crystal droplets self-propel in a surfactant solution with concentrations above the critical micelle concentration while undergoing micellar solubilization [Herminghaus et al., Soft Matter 10, 7008 (2014)]. We analyzed trajectories both in a Hele-Shaw geometry and in a 3D setup at variable buoyancy. The coupling between the nematic director field and the convective flow inside the droplet leads to a second symmetry breaking which gives rise to curling motion in 2D. This is demonstrated through a reversible transition to nonhelical persistent swimming by heating to the isotropic phase. Furthermore, autochemotaxis can spontaneously break the inversion symmetry, leading to helical trajectories in 3D.

• Publication year

  2016

• Venue

  Physical Review Letters

• Publication date

  2016-05-11

• Fields of study

  Materials Science, Medicine, Physics, Chemistry

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.048003arXiv 1605.03396PMID 27494501
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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