Student Posters Repository

Nanoparticles have applications in many branches. For example, they are used as drug carriers as they can keep drugs out of healthy tissue and slip selectively into cancerous tissue (active targeted drug delivery). We perform nanoscale simulations to study their hydrodynamic behavior using the fluctuating lattice-Boltzmann method and its extensions developed in Softsimu Group [1], where for the first time, thermal fluctuation was implemented in the lattice-Boltzmann method in a physically correct way. In our simulations, chiral ferromagnetic nanoparticles energized by a global rotating magnetic field are propelled in fluid. We study their individual and collective behaviors and report on the emergence of a large-scale collective motion: global rotation in the system of swimming nanoparticles. We identify the spontaneous symmetry breaking by the rotation of the left-handed chiral particles and rotational alignment of particle velocities to be the physical mechanisms leading to this behavior. Our findings provides new information on the onset of spatial and temporal coherence in a large class of active synthetic systems.

Reference:

[1] Ollila, S. T., Denniston, C., Karttunen, M., & Ala-Nissila, T. (2011). Fluctuating lattice-Boltzmann model for complex fluids. The Journal of chemical physics, 134(6), 064902.