Doherty Rachel P, Varkevisser Thijs, Teunisse Margot, Hoecht Jonas, Ketzetzi Stefania, Ouhajji Samia, Kraft Daniela J
Soft Matter Physics, Huygens-Kamerlingh Onnes Laboratory, Leiden University, P.O. Box 9504, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands.
Soft Matter. 2020 Dec 14;16(46):10463-10469. doi: 10.1039/d0sm01320j. Epub 2020 Oct 15.
Synthetic microswimmers are widely employed model systems in the studies of out-of-equilibrium phenomena. Unlike biological microswimmers which naturally occur in various shapes and forms, synthetic microswimmers have so far been limited almost exclusively to spherical shapes. Here, we exploit 3D printing to produce microswimmers with complex shapes in the colloidal size regime. We establish the flexibility of 3D printing by two-photon polymerisation to produce particles smaller than 10 microns with a high-degree of shape complexity. We further demonstrate that 3D printing allows control over the location of the active site through orienting the particles in different directions during printing. We verify that particles behave colloidally by imaging their motion in the passive and active states and by investigating their mean square displacement. In addition, we find that particles exhibit shape-dependant behavior, thereby demonstrating the potential of our method to launch a wide-range of in-depth studies into shape-dependent active motion and behaviour.
合成微泳器是研究非平衡现象时广泛使用的模型系统。与天然存在各种形状和形态的生物微泳器不同，迄今为止，合成微泳器几乎仅限于球形。在此，我们利用3D打印在胶体尺寸范围内制造具有复杂形状的微泳器。我们通过双光子聚合建立了3D打印的灵活性，以制造尺寸小于10微米且形状复杂度高的颗粒。我们进一步证明，3D打印可以通过在打印过程中使颗粒沿不同方向定向来控制活性位点的位置。我们通过对颗粒在被动和主动状态下的运动进行成像并研究其均方位移来验证颗粒的胶体行为。此外，我们发现颗粒表现出形状依赖性行为，从而证明了我们的方法有潜力开展一系列关于形状依赖性主动运动和行为的深入研究。
