Nanowerk  February 23, 2022 Self-organized vortex of rotating microparticles in a fluid will reverse direction when an electric stimulus is interrupted and then reapplied with the same orientation. A team of researchers in the US (Argonne National Laboratory, Northwestern University) investigated how these collective self-assembled states can be controlled and manipulated, and what would happen when they stopped and then restarted the field fueling the motion of the particles. They found that the particles’ relative positions created a kind of distributed collective memory that caused them to begin to rotate in the opposite direction. They found that this phenomenon was […]