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Applied physics

On a roll

Nature volume 503, pages 43–44 (2013)Cite this article

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Populations of rolling particles have been shown to display unidirectional collective motion in a racetrack enclosure. Theoretical modelling suggests that hydrodynamic and electrostatic effects promote such behaviour. See Letter p.95

Herds of Quincke rollers are a new example of active matter. This is the subject of a field spanning many disciplines that originated through researchers' desire to understand self-organized structures in biology, such as bird flocks and bacterial swarms, and the cellular cytoskeleton3. Although active matter lacks a simple definition, we tend to think of active-matter systems as those composed of many, possibly identical, interacting particles that each use a local energy source to execute a change in shape, orientation or position. Roller herds are akin to microswimmer suspensions, such as bacterial baths4, whose members also interact with each other hydrodynamically. But, unlike such free swimmers, Quincke rollers move through an applied net torque, which results in a very different hydrodynamic coupling between them.

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Figure 1: Roller herds.

ANTOINE BRICARD/NICOLAS DESREUMAUX/DENIS BARTOLO

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  1. Michael Shelley is in the Courant Institute, New York University, New York, New York 10012, USA.,

    Michael Shelley

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Correspondence to Michael Shelley.

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Shelley, M. On a roll. Nature 503, 43–44 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/503043a

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