Journal
NATURE CHEMISTRY
Volume 12, Issue 12, Pages 1136-+Publisher
NATURE PORTFOLIO
DOI: 10.1038/s41557-020-00575-0
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Funding
- Army Research Office [W911NF-18-1-0414]
- Penn State MRSEC - National Science Foundation [DMR-1420620]
- Thomas and June Beaver Fellowship at Penn State
- Pennsylvania Space Grant Fellowship
- Erickson Discovery Grant Program at Penn State
- NWO (Dutch National Science Foundation) Graduate Program through the Debye Institute for Nanomaterials
- program for Chang Jiang Scholars and Innovative Research Teams in Universities [IRT 17R40]
- 111 Project of the PRC
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Chemotactic interactions are ubiquitous in nature and can lead to non-reciprocal and complex emergent behaviour in multibody systems. However, developing synthetic, inanimate embodiments of a chemomechanical framework to generate non-reciprocal interactions of tunable strength and directionality has been challenging. Here we show how chemotactic signalling between microscale oil droplets of different chemistries in micellar surfactant solutions can result in predator-prey-like non-reciprocal chasing interactions. The interactions and dynamic self-organization result from the net directional, micelle-mediated transport of oil between emulsion droplets of differing composition and are powered by the free energy of mixing. We systematically elucidated chemical design rules to tune the interactions between droplets by varying the oil and surfactant chemical structure and concentration. Through the integration of experiment and simulation, we also investigated the active behaviour and dynamic reorganization of multidroplet clusters. Our findings demonstrate how chemically minimal systems can be designed with controllable, non-reciprocal chemotactic interactions to generate emergent self-organization and collective behaviours reminiscent of biological systems.
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