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Self-propelled motors

Light-seeking synthetic trees

Nature Nanotechnology volume 11, pages 1003–1004 (2016)Cite this article

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Nanostructured photocatalytic microrods can swim either towards or away from a light source depending on their surface functionalization.

Despite the progress in the design of self-powered motors, the control of directionality, a must for many projected applications, remains a significant challenge. At the micrometre scale, this is especially problematical in the face of Brownian randomization. A common method of directing motion is by applying an external magnetic field5, but a more interesting one, ubiquitous in biology, is chemotaxis in which a fuel gradient is used6. Writing in Nature Nanotechnology, Jinyao Tang and co-workers at the University of Hong Kong, now show that a light gradient can also be used as the information source to impart directionality to a self-electrophoretic motor7.

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Figure 1: A general mechanism of self-electrophoretic motion induced by catalytic redox reactions occurring at opposite ends of an object.
Figure 2: Schematic of the self-propelled photocatalytic microtree of Tang and co-workers.

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  1. Ayusman Sen is in the Department of Chemistry, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, USA,

    Ayusman Sen

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Sen, A. Light-seeking synthetic trees. Nature Nanotech 11, 1003–1004 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2016.222

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