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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…
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.…
Motility is a fundamental survival strategy of bacteria to navigate porous environments. Swimming cells thrive in quiescent wetlands and sediments at the bottom of the marine water column, where they mediate many essential biogeochemical…
Control of acoustic streaming can significantly impact fluid and particle transport in microfluidics. We report enhancement, suppression, and reversal of acoustic streaming inside a rectangular microchannel by controlling the fluid…
Scyphozoan jellyfish exhibit the highest locomotive efficiency in the animal kingdom making them of particular interest in fluid dynamics and bioinspired robotics. Despite this prevalent analytical models of jellyfish swimming have been…
Quantifying the physical mechanisms responsible for the transport of sediments, nutrients and pollutants in the abyssal sea is a long-standing problem, with internal waves regularly invoked as the relevant mechanism for particle advection…
Self-propelling bacteria are a dream of nano-technology. These unicellular organisms are not just capable of living and reproducing, but they can swim very efficiently, sense the environment and look for food, all packaged in a body…
Self-propulsion plays a crucial role in biological processes and nanorobotics, enabling small systems to move autonomously in noisy environments. Here, we theoretically demonstrate that a bound skyrmion-skyrmion pair in a synthetic…
Sound can move particles. A good example of this phenomenon is the Chladni plate, in which an acoustic wave is induced in a metallic plate and particles migrate to the nodes of the acoustic wave. For several years, acoustophoresis has been…
A growing body of work aims at designing and testing micron-scale synthetic swimmers. One method, inspired by the locomotion of flagellated bacteria, consists of applying a rotating magnetic field to a rigid, helically-shaped, propeller…
Many microorganisms and artificial microswimmers use helical appendages in order to generate locomotion. Though often rotated so as to produce thrust, some species of bacteria such Spiroplasma, Rhodobacter sphaeroides and Spirochetes induce…
We present here a comprehensive derivation for the speed of a small bottom-heavy sphere forced by a transverse acoustic field and thereby establish how density inhomogeneities may play a critical role in acoustic propulsion. The sphere is…
The interaction of an acoustic wave with a stratified fluid can drive strong streaming flows owing to the baroclinic production of fluctuating vorticity, as recently demonstrated by Chini et al. (J. Fluid Mech., 744, 2014, pp. 329). In the…
Self-propelled particles move along circles rather than along a straight line when their driving force does not coincide with their propagation direction. Examples include confined bacteria and spermatozoa, catalytically driven nanorods,…
We demonstrate with experiments and simulations how microscopic self-propelled particles navigate through environments presenting complex spatial features, which mimic the conditions inside cells, living organisms and future lab-on-a-chip…
In our article we present a computational model for the simulation of self-propelled anisotropic bacteria. To this end we use a self-propelled particle model and augment it with a statistical algorithm for the run-and-tumble motion. We…
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…
We present an acoustofluidic method based on travelling surface acoustic waves (TSAWs) for the induction of the self-assembly of microparticles inside a microfluidic channel. The particles are trapped above an interdigitated transducer,…
There is increasing evidence that mammalian cells not only crawl on substrates but can also swim in fluids. To elucidate the mechanisms of the onset of motility of cells in suspension, a model which couples actin and myosin kinetics to…
A biofilm is a microbial city. It consists of bacteria embedded in an extracellular polymeric substance (EPS) that functions as a protective barrier. Quorum sensing (QS) is a method of bacterial communication, where autoinducers (AIs)…