Direct observation of the direction of motion for spherical catalytic swimmers.

Nonconductive Janus particle swimmers made by coating fluorescent polymer beads with hemispheres of platinum have been fully characterized using video microscopy to reveal that they undergo propulsion in hydrogen peroxide fuel away from the catalytic platinum patch. The platinum coating shadows the fluorescence signal from half of each swimmer to allow the orientation to be observed directly and correlated quantitatively with the resulting swimming direction. The observed swimmer direction is consistent with both the bubble release and diffusiophoretic propulsion mechanisms.

[1]  Ramin Golestanian,et al.  Self-motile colloidal particles: from directed propulsion to random walk. , 2007, Physical review letters.

[2]  Stephen J. Ebbens,et al.  In pursuit of propulsion at the nanoscale , 2010 .

[3]  G. Whitesides,et al.  Autonomous Movement and Self‐Assembly , 2002 .

[4]  T. Mallouk,et al.  Bipolar electrochemical mechanism for the propulsion of catalytic nanomotors in hydrogen peroxide solutions. , 2006, Langmuir : the ACS journal of surfaces and colloids.

[5]  Jonathan D Posner,et al.  Synthetic nanomotors in microchannel networks: directional microchip motion and controlled manipulation of cargo. , 2008, Journal of the American Chemical Society.

[6]  Raymond Kapral,et al.  Chemically powered nanodimers. , 2007, Physical review letters.

[7]  Ramin Golestanian,et al.  Anomalous diffusion of symmetric and asymmetric active colloids. , 2009, Physical review letters.

[8]  B. Ranjbar,et al.  Nanotechnology helps medicine: nanoscale swimmers and their future applications. , 2005, Medical hypotheses.

[9]  Auke Meetsma,et al.  Catalytic molecular motors: fuelling autonomous movement by a surface bound synthetic manganese catalase. , 2005, Chemical communications.

[10]  R. Golestanian,et al.  Designing phoretic micro- and nano-swimmers , 2007, cond-mat/0701168.

[11]  Kalayil Manian Manesh,et al.  Ultrafast catalytic alloy nanomotors. , 2008, Angewandte Chemie.

[12]  Ramin Golestanian,et al.  Propulsion of a molecular machine by asymmetric distribution of reaction products. , 2005, Physical review letters.

[13]  Ben L Feringa,et al.  Autonomous propulsion of carbon nanotubes powered by a multienzyme ensemble. , 2008, Chemical communications.

[14]  Ayusman Sen,et al.  Catalytic motors for transport of colloidal cargo. , 2008, Nano letters.

[15]  J Cranshaw,et al.  Search for excited and exotic electrons in the egamma decay channel in pp collisions at sqrt[s] = 1.96 TeV. , 2005, Physical review letters.

[16]  John G. Gibbs,et al.  Autonomously motile catalytic nanomotors by bubble propulsion , 2009 .

[17]  Caleb J. Behrend,et al.  Brownian modulated optical nanoprobes , 2004 .

[18]  Raymond Kapral,et al.  Catalytic nanomotors: self-propelled sphere dimers. , 2010, Small.