Morphodynamics of surface-attached active drops
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1.
Princeton University
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2.
California Institute of Technology
Abstract
Many biological and synthetic systems are suspensions of oriented actively-moving components. Unlike in passive suspensions, the interplay between orientational order, active flows, and interactions with boundaries gives rise to fascinating new phenomena in such active suspensions. Here, we examine the paradigmatic example of a surface-attached drop of an active fluid (an "active drop"), which has so far only been studied in the idealized limit of thin drops. We find that such surface-attached active drops can exhibit a wide array of stable steady-state shapes and internal flows that are far richer than those documented previously, depending on boundary conditions and the strength of active stresses. Our analysis uncovers quantitative principles to predict and even rationally control the conditions under which these different states arise—yielding design principles for next-generation active materials.
Copyright and License
© The Author(s) 2026. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Acknowledgement
We thank the members of the Datta Lab for their valuable feedback. A.M.-C. acknowledges support from the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science, the Center for the Physics of Biological Function, and the Human Frontier Science Program through the grant LT000035/2021-C. S.S.D. acknowledges support from NSF Grants CBET-1941716 and DMR-2011750, as well as the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar and Pew Biomedical Scholars Programs.
Contributions
A.M.-C.: conceptualization, methodology, software, validation, formal analysis, investigation, data curation, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing, visualization, project administration, and funding acquisition. S.S.D.: conceptualization, resources, writing—review and editing, supervision, project administration, and funding acquisition.
Data Availability
The raw data supporting the findings of this study are available at Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17872650).
Code Availability
The simulation files supporting the findings of this study are available at Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17872650).
Supplemental Material
Files
s41467-025-68235-w.pdf
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Additional details
Identifiers
- PMID
- 41680138
- PMCID
- PMC12905126
Related works
- Describes
- Journal Article: 41680138 (PMID)
- Journal Article: PMC12905126 (PMCID)
- Journal Article: https://rdcu.be/e4M2d (ReadCube)
- Is supplemented by
- Dataset: 10.5281/zenodo.17872650 (DOI)
Funding
- Princeton University
- International Human Frontier Science Program Organization
- LT000035/2021-C
- National Science Foundation
- CBET-1941716
- National Science Foundation
- DMR-2011750
- Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation
- Pew Charitable Trusts
Dates
- Submitted
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2024-11-21
- Accepted
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2025-12-19
- Available
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2026-02-13Version of record
Caltech Custom Metadata
- Caltech groups
- Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering (CCE)
- Publication Status
- Published