[Originally posted on LinkedIn on 23rd September 2025]
Pollen can fly through air, spreading plant seeds to new locations. But can this behaviour be recreated and controlled to create tiny motorised systems?
Inspired by the shape of pollen particles, a new paper in Advanced Materials introduces a new micromotor that travels in air, controlled by light.
The authors built a spikey pollen-like shape by assembling a series of layers:
- Core of spherical zinc
- Spikey zinc oxide
- Gold nanoparticles
- Lanthanide nanoparticles
Coating the spikey surface with gold nanoparticles enabled the micromotors to be stimulated by near-infrared light, while adding lanthanide nanoparticles allowed the system behaviour to be monitored.
Placing the micromotors in a glass tube, their movement was controlled by changing the laser power and timing, with the motors overcoming gravity for three minutes. This behaviour was not observed for micromotors without gold nanoparticles added. Additionally, the motors were able to travel from water into air.
Why does this matter?
Previously designed micromotors have been limited to water-based travel. Creating a micromotor that can travel in air in a controlled way opens a range of new potential applications, including toxin detection and pollution control.
More generally, the motors could carry cargo other than the lanthanide nanoparticles used in the study. This means they could act as microscopic delivery robots, moving through air to reach their destination.
Read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202505959 from Wiley
Pedro Mena-Giraldo, Gabrielle A. Mandl, Victor Quezada-Novoa, Camilo Garcia-Henao, Nicolas Bondon, Melanie Jane Hazlett and John A. Capobianco, Light-Activated Micromotors in Air Propelled by Thermal Convection, Adv. Mater., 2025, e05959