Related papers: Diffusion and spatial correlations in suspensions …
Ensembles of biological and artificial microswimmers produce long-range velocity fields with strong nonequilibrium fluctuations, which result in dramatic increase diffusivity of embedded particles (tracers). While such enhanced diffusivity…
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…
Swimming cells and microorganisms must often move though complex fluids that contain an immersed microstructure such as polymer molecules, or filaments. In many important biological processes, such as mammalian reproduction and bacterial…
We consider two systems of active swimmers moving close to a solid surface, one being a living population of wild-type \textit{E. coli} and the other being an assembly of self-propelled Au-Pt rods. In both situations, we have identified two…
Depending on their mechanism of self-propulsion, active particles can exhibit a time-dependent, often periodic, propulsion velocity. The precise propulsion velocity profile determines their mean square displacement and their effective…
The interaction between swimming microorganisms or artificial self-propelled colloids and passive (tracer) particles in a fluid leads to enhanced diffusion of the tracers. This enhancement has attracted strong interest, as it could lead to…
In this fluid dynamics video, we demonstrate the microscale mixing enhancement of passive tracer particles in suspensions of swimming microalgae, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. These biflagellated, single-celled eukaryotes (10 micron diameter)…
The induced diffusion of tracers in a bacterial suspension is studied theoretically and experimentally at low bacterial concentrations. Considering the swimmer-tracer hydrodynamic interactions at low-Reynolds number and using a kinetic…
Swimming bacteria create long-range velocity fields that stir a large volume of fluid and move around passive particles dispersed in the fluid. Recent experiments and simulations have shown that long-time mean-squared displacement of…
Swimming microorganisms can influence the diffusion of passive particles. The effect of this swimmer-particle interaction depends on different properties, such as the hydrodynamic field of the swimmer and the relative sizes of…
The general problem of tracer diffusion in non-equilibrium baths is important in a wide range of systems, from the cellular level to geographical lengthscales. In this paper, we revisit the archetypical example of such a system: a…
The diffusion of active microscopic organisms in complex environments plays an important role in a wide range of biological phenomena from cell colony growth to single organism transport. Here, we investigate theoretically and…
We identify the presence of a continuum percolation transition in model suspensions of pusher-type microswimmers. The clusters dynamically aggregate and disaggregate resulting from a competition of attractive and repulsive hydrodynamic and…
Active matter exhibits various forms of non-equilibrium states in the absence of external forcing, including macroscopic steady-state currents. Such states are often too complex to be modelled from first principles and our understanding of…
Purcell's scallop theorem states that swimmers deforming their shapes in a time-reversible manner ("reciprocal" motion) cannot swim. Using numerical simulations and theoretical calculations we show here that in a fluctuating environment,…
A dilute non-interacting suspension of micro-swimmers exhibits a finite velocity variance and short-ranged correlations that decay over a swimmer length. For a suspension of interacting straight swimmers, however, pair-interactions leads to…
Understanding the transport properties of microorganisms and self-propelled particles in porous media has important implications for human health as well as microbial ecology. In free space, most microswimmers perform diffusive random walks…
Enhanced diffusion of passive tracers immersed in active fluids is a universal feature of active fluids and has been extensively studied in recent years. Similar to microrheology for equilibrium complex fluids, the unusual enhanced particle…
We consider the tracer diffusion $D_{rr}$ that arises from the run-and-tumble motion of low Reynolds number swimmers, such as bacteria. Assuming a dilute suspension, where the bacteria move in uncorrelated runs of length $\lambda$, we…
Tracer particles immersed in suspensions of biological microswimmers such as E. coli or C. reinhardtii display phenomena unseen in conventional equilibrium systems, including strongly enhanced diffusivity relative to the Brownian value and…