The interest in active matter, of which microswimmers are an example, arises both for fundamental and applied reasons. On the fundamental side, the study of active matter can shed light on the far-from-equilibrium physics underlying the adaptive and collective behavior of biological entities such as chemotactic bacteria and eukaryotic cells. From the more applied side, active matter provides tantalizing options to perform tasks not easily achievable with other available techniques, such as the targeted localization, pick-up and delivery of microscopic and nanoscopic cargoes in applications such as drug delivery, bioremediation and chemical sensing.
However, at the beginning of this project, there were still several open challenges that needed to be tackled in order to achieve the full scientific and technological potential of active matter in real-life settings. The main challenges were:
(1) to identify a biocompatible propulstion mechanism and energy supply capable of lasting for the whole particle life-cycle;
(2) to understand their behavior in complex and crowded environments;
(3) to learn how to engineer emergent behaviors; and (4) to scale down their dimensions towards the nanoscale.
The ERC-StG ComplexSwimmers aimed at tackling these challenges by developing biocompatible microswimmers capable of elaborate behaviors, by engineering their performance when interacting with other particles and with a complex environment, and by developing working nanoswimmers.
To achieve these goals, we laid out a roadmap that led us to push the frontiers of the current understanding of active matter both at the mesoscopic and at the nanoscopic scale, and permitted us to develop some technologically disruptive techniques.
