Related papers: Life at high Deborah number
Swimming micro-organisms such as bacteria or spermatozoa are typically found in dense suspensions, and exhibit collective modes of locomotion qualitatively different from that displayed by isolated cells. In the dilute limit where…
In G.I. Taylor's historic paper on swimming microorganisms, a two dimensional sheet was proposed as a model for flagellated cells passing traveling waves as a means of locomotion. Using a perturbation series, Taylor computed swimming speeds…
For composite systems made of $N$ different particles living in a space characterized by the same deformed Heisenberg algebra, but with different deformation parameters, we define the total momentum and the center-of-mass position to first…
Undulatory locomotion, as seen in the nematode \emph{Caenorhabditis elegans}, is a common swimming gait of organisms in the low Reynolds number regime, where viscous forces are dominant. While the nematode's motility is expected to be a…
Consider a deformable body immersed in an incompressible liquid that is randomly stirred. Sticking to physical situations in which the body departs only slightly from its spherical shape, we investigate the motion of the body, calculate its…
Detailed data describing the motion of a rigid sphere settling in unperturbed fluid is generated by means of highly-accurate spectral/spectral-element simulations with the purpose of serving as a future benchmark case. A single…
Biological microswimmers such as bacteria and sperm cells often encounter complex biological fluid environments. Here we use the well-known squirmer microswimmer model to show the importance of the local fluid microstructure and…
The swimming behavior of bacteria and other microorganisms is sensitive to the physical properties of the fluid in which they swim. Mucus, biofilms, and artificial liquid-crystalline solutions are all examples of fluids with some degree of…
Recent results suggest that highly active, chaotic, non-equilibrium states of living fluids might share much in common with high Reynolds number, inertial turbulence. We now show, by using a hydrodynamical model, the onset of intermittency…
In this paper we study the locomotion of a shape-changing body swimming in a two-dimensional perfect fluid of infinite extent. The shape-changes are prescribed as functions of time satisfying constraints ensuring that they result from the…
The swimming of an elliptical disk at small Reynolds number is studied on the basis of a perturbative solution of the Navier-Stokes equations for fluid flow near a deformable infinite sheet. A stroke involving an elliptically polarized…
Biological systems commonly combine intrinsically out-of-equilibrium active components with passive polymeric inclusions to produce unique material properties. To explore these composite systems, idealized models - such as polymers in…
We consider a rigid body freely moving in a compressible inviscid fluid within a bounded domain $\Omega\subset\mathbb{R}^3$. The fluid is thereby governed by the non necessarily isentropic compressible Euler equations, while the rigid body…
When analyzing the broadband absorption spectrum of liquid water (10^10 - 10^13 Hz), we find its relaxation-resonance features to be an indication of Frenkel's translation-oscillation motion of particles, which is fundamentally inherent to…
Simulations of undulatory swimming in viscoelastic fluids with large amplitude gaits show concentration of polymer elastic stress at the tips of the swimmers.We use a series of related theoretical investigations to probe the origin of these…
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…
Soft colloids allow to explore high density states well beyond random close packing. An important open question is whether softness controls the dynamics under these dense conditions. While experimental works reported conflicting results,…
We theoretically investigate self-oscillating waves of an active material, which have recently been introduced as a non-symmetric part of the elastic moduli, termed odd elasticity. Using Purcell's three-link swimmer model, we reveal that an…
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…
We experimentally study a scallop-like swimmer with reciprocally flapping wings in a nearly frictionless, cohesive granular medium consisting of hydrogel spheres. Significant locomotion is found when the swimmer's flapping frequency matches…