Abstract
Activity and autonomous motion are fundamental aspects of many living and engineering systems. Here, the scale of biological agents covers a wide range, from nanomotors, cytoskeleton, and cells, to insects, fish, birds, and people. Inspired by biological active systems, various types of autonomous synthetic nano- and micromachines have been designed, which provide the basis for multifunctional, highly responsive, intelligent active materials. A major challenge for understanding and designing active matter is their inherent non-equilibrium nature due to persistent energy consumption, which invalidates equilibrium concepts such as free energy, detailed balance, and time-reversal symmetry. Furthermore, interactions in ensembles of active agents are often non-additive and non-reciprocal. An important aspect of biological agents is their ability to sense the environment, process this information, and adjust their motion accordingly. It is an important goal for the engineering of micro-robotic systems to achieve similar functionality. Many fundamental properties of motile active matter are by now reasonably well understood and under control. Thus, the ground is now prepared for the study of physical aspects and mechanisms of motion in complex environments, the behavior of systems with new physical features like chirality, the development of novel micromachines and microbots, the emergent collective behavior and swarming of intelligent self-propelled particles, and particular features of microbial systems. The vast complexity of phenomena and mechanisms involved in the self-organization and dynamics of motile active matter poses major challenges, which can only be addressed by a truly interdisciplinary effort involving scientists from biology, chemistry, ecology, engineering, mathematics, and physics. The 2025 motile active matter roadmap of Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter reviews the current state of the art of the field and provides guidance for further progress in this fascinating research area.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 143501 |
| Journal | Journal of Physics Condensed Matter |
| Volume | 37 |
| Issue number | 14 |
| Early online date | 19 Feb 2025 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 7 Apr 2025 |
Funding
I would like to thank Lisa Rohde, Akshay Kallikkunnath, Gordei Anchutkin, and Xiangzun Wang for contributing unpublished results and many discussions to the topic of the publication. We acknowledge funding by German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) through Project No. 432421051 and by the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (Scads.AI) Dresden/Leipzig. H A Stone acknowledges the National Science Foundation for support from CBET-2127563 and the Princeton University Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, DMR-2011750. This work has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union\u2019s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant Agreement No. 770964). O F was supported by the Israel Science Foundation Grant. 1727/20. A K was supported by the Israel Science Foundation Grant 1574/24. O F is the incumbent of the H J Leir Professorial chair. We thank Sarit Barnard for the illustrations in figure . J B acknowledges funding from the European Union\u2019s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 101106500. The authors acknowledge the support of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through New Investigator Award No. EP/T000961/1. FB acknowledges support of the GBMF post-doctoral fellowship (GBMF Award #2919) and through the Simons Foundation Grant (#216179) to the KITP. MCM was supported by the National Science Foundation Award No. DMR-2041459. We thank L Di Carlo, T Grigera, G Pisegna, and M Scandolo, for having accompanied us in the discovery of the relevance of RG crossovers in biological systems. This work was supported by ERC grant RG.BIO (n. 785932) and by PRIN2020 Grant n. 2020PFCXPE. The author thanks Tanumoy Dhar, J\u00E9r\u00E9mie Palacci and Daniel Grober for useful conversations, and acknowledges funding from National Science Foundation Grant No. CBET-1934199. F P acknowledges financial support from C Y Initiative of Excellence (Grant \u2018Investissements d\u2019Avenir,\u2019 Grant No. ANR-16-IDEX-0008); INEX 2021 Ambition Project CollInt; and Labex MME-DII, Projects Nos. 2021-258 and 2021-297. B J N is a co-founder of Nanoflex Robotics AG and MagnetbotiX AG. B J N is an inventor on patents related to microrobots and magnetic navigation systems. H.G would like to acknowledge the support from Swiss National Science Foundation (Project Number: 203203). We are grateful for the following funders for enabling our work onthis topic: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF Consolidator Grant TMCG-3_213801 to K.D.), Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DR 982/6-1 to K.D., as part of the Priority Programme SPP 2389). The author thanks Robert Style for discussions. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union\u2019s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program Grant Agreement No. 101001514. Many stimulating discussions and collaborations with Marielle Ga\u00DFner, Segun Goh, Priyanka Iyer, Rajendra Singh Negi, and Roland G Winkler are gratefully acknowledged. This project has been supported by the ETN \u201CPHYMOT\u201D (Physics of Microbial Motility) within the European Union\u2019s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant Agreement 955910. R D L acknowledges funding from European Research Council under the ERC Grant Agreement No. 834615. This work was supported by the DFG Center of Excellence 2117 \u2018Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour\u2019 (ID: 422037984)
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- General Materials Science
- Condensed Matter Physics