Driving Self-organization of Mesoscale Systems Through Environmentally Mediated Torques
By: Maks Bambic
From: Centro de Física Teórica e Computacional, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
At: Building C2, room 2.4.16
[2026-03-12]
Assembling structures piece-by-piece is a reliable way of fabricating at the macro-scale. At small scales, however, this approach suffers from space and access constraints. Nonetheless, small, reconfigurable and functional structures have a myriad of potential applications, from drug delivery to microrobotics, and so alternative strategies of fabrication are required. One possibility is to take inspiration from nature, where complex structures come together from their constitutive pieces in a process known as self-organization. In such systems, the environment plays a crucial role by mediating interactions between the pieces. In this talk, I will discuss how self-organization of two synthetic systems can be driven using torques that arise naturally from environmental interactions. The first system consists of thermally folding multileveled kirigami micro-structures whose motion is coupled with a hydrodynamic torque. Simple modifications to the structure affect the magnitude of this torque, improving both the folding rate and yield. The second system concerns active particles moving in a heterogeneous environment consisting of passive Brownian particles. The active particles interact with the surrounding environment through a torque that facilitates the formation of clusters. By tuning the dynamics of the active particles or the effective strength of the environmental torque, the organization and dynamics of the resulting clusters can be controlled. These results highlight how environmental interactions can control the self-organization and dynamics in two synthetic mesoscale systems.