Collective Motion of Quincke Rollers with Fully Resolved Hydrodynamics

TL;DR

This paper investigates the collective behavior of Quincke rollers by performing detailed 3D simulations that explicitly resolve hydrodynamic interactions, revealing how these interactions influence phase stability and transitions.

Contribution

It introduces a fully resolved hydrodynamic simulation approach to study collective dynamics of Quincke rollers, highlighting the destabilizing effect of near-field interactions at high densities.

Findings

Hydrodynamic interactions significantly affect collective states.

Near-field lubrication dominates at high densities.

Ordered polar liquid states become unstable due to hydrodynamics.

Abstract

A Quincke roller is a unique active particle that can run and tumble freely on a flat plate due to the torque generated by a uniform DC electric field applied perpendicular to the plate. A system involving many such particles exhibits a variety of collective dynamics, such as the disordered gas, polar liquid, and active crystal states. We performed direct numerical simulations of a three-dimensional system containing many self-rotating particles to explicitly resolve the hydrodynamic interactions among rotating particles. The collective motion depends on the magnitude of the dipole moments induced on the dielectric particles, the area fraction of particles, and the strength of interparticle attraction. We find that the highly ordered polar liquid state is destabilized by the hydrodynamic interaction between rotating particles at high densities: the near-field lubrication interaction becomes dominant over far-field effects as the interparticle separation becomes shorter.