Emergence of Bimodal Motility in Active Droplets

To explore and react to their environment, living micro-swimmers have developed sophisticated strategies for locomotion - in particular, motility with multiple gaits. understand the physical principles associated such a behavioural variability,synthetic model systems capable of mimicking it are needed. Here, we demonstrate bimodal gait switching autophoretic droplet swimmers. This minimal experimental system is isotropic at rest, symmetry that can be spontaneously broken due nonlinear coupling between hydrodynamic chemical fields, inducing variety flow patterns lead different propulsive modes. We report dynamical transition from quasi-ballistic chaotic motion, controlled by viscosity swimming medium. By simultaneous visualisation supported quantitatively an advection-diffusion model, show higher modes become excitable increasing viscosity, while recurrent mode-switching driven droplet's interaction self-generated gradients. further this gradient results anomalous diffusive akin self-avoiding spatial exploration observed nature.