Marisol Ripoll and Mingcheng Yang
Theoretical Soft-Matter and Biophysics, Institute of Complex Systems,Forschungszentrum Juelich, Germany
In the presence of a temperature gradient, a colloidal particle experiences a directional motion that can be oriented to the warm or to the cold areas depending on the colloid-solvent interactions. This directed motion is known as thermophoresis, thermal diffusion, or Soret effect. Two interesting aspects of the thermophoretic effect are that it can produce colloidal self-propelled motion, and that it generates a flow of the colloid surrounding solvent. We will summarize recent investigations of these phenomena performed by means of multiparticle collision dynamics simulations (MPC).