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Various microswimmers move along circles rather than straight lines due to their swimming mechanisms, body shapes or hydrodynamic effects. Here, we adopt the concepts of stochastic thermodynamics to analyze circle swimmers confined in a…
A Marangoni surfer is an object embedded in a gas-liquid interface, propelled by gradients in surface tension. We derive an analytical theorem for the lower bound on the viscous dissipation by a Marangoni surfer in the limit of small…
We use numerical simulations to probe the dynamics of concentrated suspensions of spherical microswimmers interacting hydrodynamically. Previous work in the dilute limit predicted orientational instabilities of aligned suspensions for both…
We analyze a minimal model for a rigid spherical microswimmer and explore the consequences of its extended surface on the interplay between its self-propulsion and flow properties. The model is the first order representation of…
Contrasting the well explored problem on how to steer a macroscopic agent like an airplane or a moon lander to optimally reach a target, "optimal microswimming", i.e. the quest for the optimal navigation strategy for microswimmers, remains…
Swimming microorganisms often self propel in fluids with complex rheology. While past theoretical work indicates that fluid viscoelasticity should hinder their locomotion, recent experiments on waving swimmers suggest a possible…
Inspired by the classical Kepler and Rutherford problem, we investigate an analogous set-up in the context of active microswimmers: the behavior of a deformable microswimmer in a swirl flow. First we identify new steady bound states in the…
Transport of material across liquid interfaces is ubiquitous for living cells and is also a crucial step in drug delivery and in many industrial processes. The fluids that are present on either side of the interfaces will usually have…
We theoretically and computationally study the low-Reynolds-number hydrodynamics of a linear active microswimmer surfing on a compressible thin fluid layer characterized by an odd viscosity. Since the underlying three-dimensional fluid is…
We present numerical simulations of simplified models for swimming organisms or robots, using chordwise flexible elastic plates. We focus on the tip vortices originating from three-dimensional effects due to the finite span of the plate.…
We investigate a self-organized swimmer at low Reynolds numbers. The microscopic swimmer is composed of three spheres that are connected by two identical active linker arms. Each linker arm contains molecular motors and elastic elements and…
In this article, we consider a swimmer (i.e. a self-deformable body) immersed in a fluid, the flow of which is governed by the stationary Stokes equations. This model is relevant for studying the locomotion of microorganisms or micro robots…
In this paper we study a mathematical model of one-dimensional swimmers performing a planar motion while fully immersed in a viscous fluid. The swimmers are assumed to be of small size, and all inertial effects are neglected. Hydrodynamic…
Undulatory slender objects have been a central theme in the hydrodynamics of swimming at low Reynolds number, where the slender body is usually assumed to be inextensible, although some microorganisms and artificial microrobots largely…
Microorganisms often encounter strong confinement and complex hydrodynamic flows while navigating their habitats. Combining finite-element methods and stochastic simulations, we study the interplay of active transport and heterogeneous…
An artificial microswimmer drifts in response to spatio-temporal modulations of an activating suspension medium. We consider two competing mechanisms capable of influencing its tactic response: angular fluctuations, which help it explore…
Microorganism motility often takes place within complex, viscoelastic fluid environments, e.g., sperm in cervicovaginal mucus and bacteria in biofilms. In such complex fluids, strains and stresses generated by the microorganism are stored…
We investigate the hydrodynamic interactions between microorganisms swimming at low Reynolds number. By considering simple model swimmers, and combining analytic and numerical approaches, we investigate the time-averaged flow field around a…
Physics governing the locomotion of microorganisms and other microsystems is dominated by viscous damping. An effective swimming strategy involves the non-reciprocal and periodic deformations of the considered body. Here, we show that a…
Suspensions of unicellular microswimmers such as flagellated bacteria or motile algae exhibit spontaneous density heterogeneities at large enough concentrations. Based on the relative location of the biological actuation appendages i.e.…