How does the orientation of an active colloid influence the dynamics of clusters?*

Synthetic active colloids exhibit interesting translational and rotational self-propulsion and collective behavior. The motion of individual synthetic active colloids is well-understood. However, there exist fewer studies focused on understanding the dynamical changes when a group of active particles are clustered. In this talk, I will present our efforts towards designing active particle assemblies with tunable translational and rotational dynamics. To this end, we assemble active colloid clusters with tailored orientations and shapes and study their dynamics. By extracting characteristic parameters like net force, the torques, and translational and rotational velocities we aim to find a generic relation between the cluster shape, particle distribution, and the resultant dynamical trajectories. We expect our work to provide the strategies for the designing and steering active entities with tailored dynamical trajectories.