In this talk, I am going to discuss about the “Assembly of colloids into linear chains and study of their structure and dynamics”. To assemble the colloids into permanent colloidal linear chains, we investigated a novel ice templating methods as well as we exploit the electric and magnetic field. A novel aspect of this work is to render the colloidal chains active, viz. out of equilibrium, by adsorbing catalytic platinum nanoparticles on their surface and by conducting reactions catalyzed by the nanoparticles. I have demonstrated that the diffusion of passive Brownian chains does not depend on chain flexibility whereas the diffusion of “active” colloidal chains is a function of their flexibility. Another novel aspect is to render the colloidal chains thermos-responsive by adhering poly N-isopropyl acrylamide micro-gel particles on the colloidal surface. Rigid chains show a modest decrease in size but exhibit no qualitative change in their shape. Relatively flexible chains form compact structures as they collapse, resulting a large increase in the local monomer number density within the chain. Chains with intermediate flexibility show the formation of helical structures on heating. Finally, I am going to talk about micromotors. Here, we study systematically the translational and rotational dynamics of active particle (Janus particles) clusters. By extracting various parameters like net force, the torques and translational and rotational velocities we aim to find a generic relation between the cluster shape, particle distribution and the resultant dynamical trajectories. We expect our work to provide strategies for the designing active entities with tailored dynamical trajectories.
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