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Active particles sense micromechanical properties of glasses

Nature Materials volume 18, pages 1118–1123 (2019)Cite this article

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Abstract

Understanding the mechanical properties of glasses is a great scientific challenge. A powerful technique to study the material response on a microscopic scale is microrheology, in which one analyses the translational dynamics of an externally driven probe particle. Here we show that the translational and rotational dynamics of a self-propelled probe particle with an unconstrained orientational motion can be used to gather information about the mechanical properties of a colloidal glassy system. We find that its rotational diffusion coefficient continuously increases towards the glass transition and drops down in the glassy state. Such unexpected behaviour demonstrates a strong coupling mechanism between the orientation of the active probe particle and the glassy structure, which can be well described by a simple rheological model. Our results suggest that active probe particles may be useful for the micromechanical characterization of complex materials.

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Fig. 1: APP dynamics within a dense binary colloidal suspension.
Fig. 2: Rotational APP dynamics.
Fig. 3: Mechanical coupling between APP and next neighbours.
Fig. 4: Mechanical model of an APP within a viscoelastic environment.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge helpful discussions with Th. Voigtmann, M. Fuchs, D. Levis and J. Berner. We thank H.-J. Kümmerer and C. Mayer for their technical support. C.B. acknowledges financial support from the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the priority programme SPP 1726 on microswimmers and by the ERC Advanced Grant ASCIR (grant no. 693683). J.R.G.-S. was supported by DFG grant no. GO 2797/1-1.

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Author notes

  1. Juan Ruben Gomez-Solano

    Present address: Instituto de Fisica, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fachbereich Physik, Universität Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany

    Celia Lozano, Juan Ruben Gomez-Solano & Clemens Bechinger

Authors
  1. Celia Lozano
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  2. Juan Ruben Gomez-Solano
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Contributions

C.L. and C.B. designed the research and wrote the paper; C.L. carried out the experiments and analysed the data; J.R.G.-S. performed the simulations.

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Correspondence to Clemens Bechinger.

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Lozano, C., Gomez-Solano, J.R. & Bechinger, C. Active particles sense micromechanical properties of glasses. Nat. Mater. 18, 1118–1123 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-019-0446-9

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