Recently, the Active Matter and Systems Chemistry research team from the School of Chemical Engineering and Technology at CUMT has achieved significant progress in the study of active matter locomotion. Their findings, titled “Chiral Locomotion Transitions of an Active Gel and Their Chemomechanical Origin,” were published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS), a leading international chemistry journal. This marks another milestone following their 2023 publication in JACS on the theoretical design of active locomotion rhythms. The paper’s first author is Yu Haodi, a direct-entry Ph.D. candidate at the School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, with CUMT listed as the primary affiliation.

Active matter is a vibrant interdisciplinary field bridging physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering, with profound implications for understanding biological motion mechanisms and developing novel smart materials. In this study, the team integrated experimental observations of active polymer gel locomotion with computational modeling to establish a kinematic criterion theory for chiral transitions in locomotion and growth. They proposed generalized dynamic equations for chiral motion and revealed the relationship between chiral locomotion transitions and phase differences in orthogonal directional motion parameters. This theoretical framework provides new perspectives and methodologies for studying active matter dynamics.

The research team has long been dedicated to active matter studies. To advance this rapidly evolving field, our university established the Interdisciplinary Research Center for Active Matter in 2016, which has since produced a series of groundbreaking results. Their work has been published in top-tier journals such as PNAS, Science Advances, Angewandte Chemie, Nature Communications, Physical Review Letters, and JACS. In 2023, the center was recognized as a university-level outstanding research platform. This latest publication represents the center’s newest advancement in active matter locomotion theory, underscoring CUMT’s sustained international leadership in the field.

Full Text Link:
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.4c15550