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Active emulsions serve as a minimal, tunable model system to uncover the physical principles governing motility far from equilibrium. Chemically isotropic oil droplets dissolving in surfactant solutions spontaneously break symmetry, generate interfacial Marangoni stresses, and self-propel. Despite their apparent simplicity, these systems exhibit rich behavior—ranging from long-ranged interactions to non-Markovian motility and collective phenomena—that parallels bacterial locomotion. We combine experiments and theory to capture the motility and interactions of these swimming droplets.
Combining experiments and theory, we demonstrate that droplet motility across its entire lifetime — from initial generation to full dissolution — is quantitatively described by a non-Markovian swimming model.
Chen, et al., Evolving Motility of Active Droplets Is Captured by a Self-Repelling Random Walk Model, Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 2025.
We characterize the motility of athermal swimming droplets within the framework of a persistent random walk at short time scales.
Izzet, et al., Tunable Persistent Random Walk in Swimming Droplets, Phys. Rev. X 10, 2020.
We characterize the steady-state, repulsive force induced by gradient-mediated interactions between droplets in absence of autophoresis.
Moerman et al., Solute-mediated interactions between active droplets, Phys. Rev. E 96, 2017.
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