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ACTIVE MATTER

Oil droplets cut to the chase

Nature Chemistry volume 12, pages 1091–1093 (2020)Cite this article

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Interactions between two bodies that are both attractive and repulsive — such as predators chasing prey — are common in nature. Similar chasing behaviour has now been engineered in self-propelling microdroplets and controlled through fundamental physical and chemical mechanisms.

In the ubiquitous struggle of eating and being eaten in nature, there are ample examples of organisms chasing each other, ranging from the macro- to the microscale; for example, neutrophils actively targeting and engulfing bacteria in the immune system. Implementing and controlling such life-like features in synthetic materials is one of the current key challenges in the emerging interdisciplinary field of motile active matter — the study of the motion and emergent collective behaviour of large numbers of self-driven components. Recently, active droplets have proven to be a useful model for biological microswimmers such as algae and bacteria. These models are often based on micellar solubilization — that is, they consist of oil droplets that self-propel while gradually dissolving into an aqueous surfactant solution1.

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Fig. 1: ‘Predator–prey’ chasing in a binary system of active droplets.

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  1. Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, Germany

    Corinna C. Maass

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  1. Corinna C. Maass
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Correspondence to Corinna C. Maass.

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Maass, C.C. Oil droplets cut to the chase. Nat. Chem. 12, 1091–1093 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41557-020-00581-2

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