Rolling microswarms along acoustic virtual walls.

Rolling is a ubiquitous transport mode utilized by living organisms and engineered systems. However, rolling at the microscale has been constrained by the requirement of a physical boundary to break the spatial homogeneity of surrounding mediums, which limits its prospects for navigation to locations with no boundaries. Here, in the absence of real boundaries, we show that microswarms can execute rolling along virtual walls in liquids, impelled by a combination of magnetic and acoustic fields. A rotational magnetic field causes individual particles to self-assemble and rotate, while the pressure nodes of an acoustic standing wave field serve as virtual walls. The acoustic radiation force pushes the microswarms towards a virtual wall and provides the reaction force needed to break their fore-aft motion symmetry and induce rolling along arbitrary trajectories. The concept of reconfigurable virtual walls overcomes the fundamental limitation of a physical boundary being required for universal rolling movements.

Bio-inspired Acousto-magnetic Microswarm Robots with Upstream Motility.

The ability to propel against flows, i.e., to perform positive rheotaxis, can provide exciting opportunities for applications in targeted therapeutics and non-invasive surgery. To date, no biocompatible technologies exist for navigating microparticles upstream when they are in a background fluid flow. Inspired by many naturally- occurring microswimmers such as bacteria, spermatozoa, and plankton that utilize the non-slip boundary conditions of the wall to exhibit upstream propulsion, here, we report on the design and characterization of self-assembled microswarms that can execute upstream motility in a combination of external acoustic and magnetic fields. Both acoustic and magnetic fields are safe to humans, non-invasive, can penetrate deeply into the human body, and are well-developed in clinical settings. The combination of both fields can overcome the limitations encountered by single actuation methods. The design criteria of the acoustically-induced reaction force of the microswarms, which is needed to perform rolling-type motion, are discussed. We show quantitative agreement between experimental data and our model that captures the rolling behaviour. The upstream capability provides a design strategy for delivering small drug molecules to hard-to-reach sites and represents a fundamental step toward the realization of micro- and nanosystem-navigation against the blood flow.

Regimes of motion of magnetocapillary swimmers.

The dynamics of a triangular magnetocapillary swimmer is studied using the lattice Boltzmann method. We extend on our previous work, which deals with the self-assembly and a specific type of the swimmer motion characterized by the swimmer's maximum velocity centred around the particle's inverse viscous time. Here, we identify additional regimes of motion. First, modifying the ratio of surface tension and magnetic forces allows to study the swimmer propagation in the regime of significantly lower frequencies mainly defined by the strength of the magnetocapillary potential. Second, introducing a constant magnetic contribution in each of the particles in addition to their magnetic moment induced by external fields leads to another regime characterized by strong in-plane swimmer reorientations that resemble experimental observations.

Correction: Capillary assemblies in a rotating magnetic field.

Correction for 'Capillary assemblies in a rotating magnetic field' by Galien Grosjean et al., Soft Matter, 2019, DOI: .

Capillary assemblies in a rotating magnetic field.

Small objects floating on a fluid have a tendency to aggregate due to capillary forces. This effect has been used, with the help of a magnetic induction field, to assemble submillimeter metallic spheres into a variety of structures, whose shape and size can be tuned. Under time-varying fields, these assemblies can propel themselves due to a breaking of time reversal symmetry in their adopted shapes. In this article, we study the influence of an in-plane rotation of the magnetic field on these structures. Various rotational modes have been observed with different underlying mechanisms. The magnetic properties of the particles cause them to rotate individually. Dipole-dipole interactions in the assembly can cause the whole structure to align with the field. Finally, non-reciprocal deformations can power the rotation of the assembly. Symmetry plays an important role in the dynamics, as well as the frequency and amplitude of the applied field. Understanding the interplay of these effects is essential, both to explain previous observations and to develop new functions for these assemblies.

Optimal motion of triangular magnetocapillary swimmers.

A system of ferromagnetic particles trapped at a liquid-liquid interface and subjected to a set of magnetic fields (magnetocapillary swimmers) is studied numerically using a hybrid method combining the pseudopotential lattice Boltzmann method and the discrete element method. After investigating the equilibrium properties of a single, two, and three particles at the interface, we demonstrate a controlled motion of the swimmer formed by three particles. It shows a sharp dependence of the average center-of-mass speed on the frequency of the time-dependent external magnetic field. Inspired by experiments on magnetocapillary microswimmers, we interpret the obtained maxima of the swimmer speed by the optimal frequency centered around the characteristic relaxation time of a spherical particle. It is also shown that the frequency corresponding to the maximum speed grows and the maximum average speed decreases with increasing interparticle distances at moderate swimmer sizes. The findings of our lattice Boltzmann simulations are supported by bead-spring model calculations.

Spin Solid versus Magnetic Charge Ordered State in Artificial Honeycomb Lattice of Connected Elements.

The nature of magnetic correlation at low temperature in two-dimensional artificial magnetic honeycomb lattice is a strongly debated issue. While theoretical researches suggest that the system will develop a novel zero entropy spin solid state as T → 0 K, a confirmation to this effect in artificial honeycomb lattice of connected elements is lacking. This study reports on the investigation of magnetic correlation in newly designed artificial permalloy honeycomb lattice of ultrasmall elements, with a typical length of ≈12 nm, using neutron scattering measurements and temperature-dependent micromagnetic simulations. Numerical modeling of the polarized neutron reflectometry data elucidates the temperature-dependent evolution of spin correlation in this system. As temperature reduces to ≈7 K, the system tends to develop novel spin solid state, manifested by the alternating distribution of magnetic vortex loops of opposite chiralities. Experimental results are complemented by temperature-dependent micromagnetic simulations that confirm the dominance of spin solid state over local magnetic charge ordered state in the artificial honeycomb lattice with connected elements. These results enable a direct investigation of novel spin solid correlation in the connected honeycomb geometry of 2D artificial structure.

Swift thermal steering of domain walls in ferromagnetic MnBi stripes.

We predict a fast domain wall (DW) motion induced by a thermal gradient across a nanoscopic ferromagnetic stripe of MnBi. The driving mechanism is an exchange torque fueled by magnon accumulation at the DWs. Depending on the thickness of the sample, both hot-to-cold and cold-to-hot DW motion directions are possible. The finding unveils an energy efficient way to manipulate DWs as an essential element in magnetic information processing such as racetrack memory.

Community-level phenological response to climate change.

Climate change may disrupt interspecies phenological synchrony, with adverse consequences to ecosystem functioning. We present here a 40-y-long time series on 10,425 dates that were systematically collected in a single Russian locality for 97 plant, 78 bird, 10 herptile, 19 insect, and 9 fungal phenological events, as well as for 77 climatic events related to temperature, precipitation, snow, ice, and frost. We show that species are shifting their phenologies at dissimilar rates, partly because they respond to different climatic factors, which in turn are shifting at dissimilar rates. Plants have advanced their spring phenology even faster than average temperature has increased, whereas migratory birds have shown more divergent responses and shifted, on average, less than plants. Phenological events of birds and insects were mainly triggered by climate cues (variation in temperature and snow and ice cover) occurring over the course of short periods, whereas many plants, herptiles, and fungi were affected by long-term climatic averages. Year-to-year variation in plants, herptiles, and insects showed a high degree of synchrony, whereas the phenological timing of fungi did not correlate with any other taxonomic group. In many cases, species that are synchronous in their year-to-year dynamics have also shifted in congruence, suggesting that climate change may have disrupted phenological synchrony less than has been previously assumed. Our results illustrate how a multidimensional change in the physical environment has translated into a community-level change in phenology.

Polarization and magnetization dynamics of a field-driven multiferroic structure.

We consider a multiferroic chain with a linear magnetoelectric coupling induced by electrostatic screening at the ferroelectric/ferromagnet interface. We study theoretically the dynamic ferroelectric and magnetic response to external magnetic and electric fields by utilizing an approach based on coupled Landau-Khalatnikov and finite-temperature Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equations. Additionally, we make comparisons with Monte Carlo calculations. It is demonstrated that for material parameters corresponding to BaTiO(3)/Fe the polarization and the magnetization are controllable by external magnetic and electric fields, respectively.