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Active matter comprised of self-propelled interacting units holds a majorpromise for extraction of useful work from its seemingly chaoticout-of-equilibrium dynamics. Streamlining active matter to produce work isespecially important at microscale, where the viscous forces prevail overinertia and the useful modes of transport require very specific non-reciprocaltype of motion. Here we report that microscopic active droplets representingaqueous dispersions of swimming bacteria Bacillus subtilis show unidirectionalpropulsion when placed in an inactive nematic medium. Random motion of bacteriainside the droplet is rectified into a directional self-locomotion of thedroplet by the polar director structure that the droplet itself creates in thesurrounding nematic through anisotropic molecular interactions at its surface.Droplets without swimming bacteria show no net displacement. The trajectory ofthe active droplet can be predesigned as rectilinear or curvilinear bypatterning the molecular orientation of the nematic medium. The effectdemonstrates that swimming at microscale can be achieved at the expense ofbroken spatial symmetry of the medium; it can be used in development ofmicromachines.

Directional self-locomotion of active droplets enabled by nematic environment