Abstract
Chiral active particles (CAPs) are self-propelled particles that break time-reversal symmetry by orbiting or spinning, leading to intriguing behaviors. This work presents simulation studies of the dynamics of chiral active particles (CAPs) interacting with complex environments. We first use active Brownian dynamics to examine the diffusion dynamics of CAPs within a lattice of disk obstacles. We find that the effective diffusivity of CAPs is not only sensitive to its persistence length and chirality, but also sensitive to the lattice configuration, a feature not found before. Moreover, by applying a global flow to the CAPs, their directional locking effect at low persistence length is the same as achiral active Brownian particles. At long persistence length, however, they exhibit emergent locked migration directions. We also show that CAPs can distinguish mirror symmetry broken circular disk lattice, and the degree of asymmetry of the lattice is correlated to how much it can distinguish clockwise and counter-clockwise CAPs. The above key results are further confirmed in a grass seed experiment. We next examine how a CAP interacts with its self-established chemical field. Specifically, we combine active Brownian dynamics with a diffusion equation to investigate the dynamics of a negative auto-chemotactic particle. Our two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) simulations give rise to curling and helical trajectories, respectively, matching well with the experiment of self-propelled liquid crystal droplet in a surfactant-rich aqueous solution. The emergent angular velocity in 2D and the helical radius in 3D are found to be a function of the strength of auto-chemotactic effect and the Peclet number. Taken together, we have provided simulation insights into how chiral active matter interact with the complex environment or with themselves, which can facilitate its applications in drug delivery, chiral separation, and active particle-based environmental sensors.