arXiv subjects

Joe Forth

Publications and source records attributed to Joe Forth.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Towards Animate Droplets: Active, Adaptive, and Autonomous

Droplets, sub-millilitre liquid volumes with at least one interface, have traditionally served as compartments for storing, transporting, and delivering materials. Beyond familiar applications in food, coatings, and consumer goods, they find cutting-edge use in energy storage, sensing, and tissue engineering. The next frontier is their integration into animate matter, emerging materials defined by their levels of activity, adaptiveness, and autonomy. Easy to produce and dispense or print into complex structures, and with enormous chemical versatility, droplets are ideal building blocks for animate matter. In this Perspective, we outline a roadmap for advancing animacy in droplets and call for a more concerted effort to integrate novel mechanisms for motility, sensing, and decision-making into droplet design. Although research on active droplets spans more than a century, achieving true autonomy, where droplets process multiple stimuli and respond without external control, remains a central challenge. We hope to inspire interdisciplinary collaboration towards applications in consumer goods, microfluidics, adaptive optics, tissue engineering, and soft robotics.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2024

Roadmap for Animate Matter

Humanity has long sought inspiration from nature to innovate materials and devices. As science advances, nature-inspired materials are becoming part of our lives. Animate materials, characterized by their activity, adaptability, and autonomy, emulate properties of living systems. While only biological materials fully embody these principles, artificial versions are advancing rapidly, promising transformative impacts across various sectors. This roadmap presents authoritative perspectives on animate materials across different disciplines and scales, highlighting their interdisciplinary nature and potential applications in diverse fields including nanotechnology, robotics and the built environment. It underscores the need for concerted efforts to address shared challenges such as complexity management, scalability, evolvability, interdisciplinary collaboration, and ethical and environmental considerations. The framework defined by classifying materials based on their level of animacy can guide this emerging field encouraging cooperation and responsible development. By unravelling the mysteries of living matter and leveraging its principles, we can design materials and systems that will transform our world in a more sustainable manner.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2024

Capillary-Assisted Printing of Droplets at a Solid-Like Liquid-Liquid Interface

Capillary forces guide the motion of biomolecular condensates, water-borne insects, and breakfast cereal. These surface-mediated interactions can be harnessed to build units into materials with exotic properties deriving from mesoscale structure. Droplets are promising building blocks for these materials, finding applications in tissue engineering, adaptive optics, and structural colour. However, the instability of water droplets at many liquid-liquid interfaces hampers the use of capillarity for the assembly of droplet-based materials. Here, we use nanoparticle surfactants to form solid-like oil-water interfaces at which aqueous droplets sit for extended periods. We find that microlitre-sized droplets at these interfaces attract each other over millimetric scales. We rationalize this interaction with a modified theory of capillarity. Applying printing methods allows us to finely control initial droplet positions, from which they self-assemble into cellular materials. Finally, by functionalising the interface with gold nanoparticles, we use plasmon-assisted optofluidics to manipulate these droplet-based materials with temperature gradients.

cond-mat.soft↗