Related papers: How efficient is towing a cargo by a micro-swimmer…

The swimming of a deformable planar slab in a viscous incompressible fluid is studied on the basis of the Navier-Stokes equations. A continuum of plane wave displacements, symmetric on both sides of the slab and characterized by a…

Biomolecular motors use free energy to drive a variety of cellular tasks, including the transport of cargo, such as vesicles and organelles. We find that the widely-used `constant-force' approximation for the effect of cargo on motor…

A flexible membrane deforming its shape in time can self-propel in a viscous fluid. Alternatively, if the membrane is anchored, its deformation will lead to fluid transport. Past work in this area focused on situations where the deformation…

Living microorganisms are capable of a tactic response to external stimuli by swimming towards or away from the stimulus source; they do so by adapting their tactic signal transduction pathways to the environment. Their self-motility thus…

Swimming microorganisms often have to propel in complex, non-Newtonian fluids. We carry out experiments with self-propelling helical swimmers driven by an externally rotating magnetic field in shear-thinning, inelastic fluids. Similarly to…

It has long been known that some microswimmers seem to swim counter-intuitively faster when the viscosity of the surrounding fluid is increased, whereas others slow down. This conflicting dependence of the swimming velocity on the viscosity…

External forces acting on a microswimmer can feed back on its self-propulsion mechanism. We discuss this load response for a generic microswimmer that swims by cyclic shape changes. We show that the change in cycle frequency is proportional…

Microswimmers, and among them aspirant microrobots, generally have to cope with flows where viscous forces are dominant, characterized by a low Reynolds number ($Re$). This implies constraints on the possible sequences of body motion, which…

Microswimmers are exposed in nature to crowded environments and their transport properties depend in a subtle way on the interaction with obstacles. Here, we investigate a model for a single ideal circle swimmer exploring a two-dimensional…

Swimming at low Reynolds number in Newtonian fluids is only possible through non-reciprocal body deformations due to the kinematic reversibility of the Stokes equations. We consider here a model swimmer consisting of two linked spheres,…

Microswimmers typically operate in complex environments. In biological systems, often diverse species are simultaneously present and interact with each other. Here, we derive a (time-dependent) particle-scale statistical description, namely…

Active matter has been the object of huge amount of research in recent years for its important fundamental and applicative properties. In this paper we investigate active suspensions of micro-swimmers through direct numerical simulation, so…

We study the motion of a microscopic swimmer composed of a semiflexible polymer anchored at the surface of a magnetic sphere using hydrodynamic simulations and scaling arguments. The swimmer is driven by a rotating magnetic field, and…

We derive a theorem for the lower bound on the energy dissipation rate by a rigid surface-driven active microswimmer of arbitrary shape in a fluid at low Reynolds number. We show that, for any swimmer, the minimum dissipation at a given…

We theoretically describe the dynamics of swimmer populations confined in thin liquid films. We first demonstrate that hydrodynamic interactions between confined swimmers only depend on their shape and are independent of their specific…

We analyze the dynamics of a microswimmer in pressure-driven Poiseuille flow, where fluid inertia is small but non-negligible. Using perturbation theory and the reciprocal theorem, we show that in addition to the classical inertial lift of…

We present a study of the hydrodynamics of an active particle, a model squirmer, in an envi- ronment with a broken rotational symmetry: a nematic liquid crystal. By combining simulations with analytic calculations, we show that the…

Cooperative motion in biological microswimmers is crucial for their survival as it facilitates adhesion to surfaces, formation of hierarchical colonies, efficient motion, and enhanced access to nutrients. Synthetic microswimmers currently…

Microswimmer suspensions self-organize into complex spatio-temporal flow patterns, including vortex lattices and mesoscale turbulence. Here we explore the consequences for the motion of passive tracers, based on a continuum model for the…

In addition to enabling movement towards environments with favourable living conditions, swimming by microorganisms has also been linked to enhanced mixing and improved nutrient uptake by their populations. Experimental studies have shown…