Size dependent efficiency of photophoretic swimmers

Abstract

We investigate experimentally the efficiency of self-propelled photophoretic swimmers based on metal-coated polymer particles of different sizes. The metal hemisphere absorbs the incident laser power and converts its energy into heat, which dissipates into the environment. A phoretic surface flow arises from the temperature gradient along the particle surface and drives the particle parallel to its symmetry axis. Scaling the particle size from micro to nanometers, the efficiency of converting optical power into motion is expected to rise with the reciprocal size for ideal swimmers. However, due to the finite size of the metal cap, the efficiency of a real swimmer reveals a maximum depending sensitively on the details of the metal cap shape. We compare the experimental results to numerical simulations.