Related papers: Do small swimmers mix the ocean?
The hydrodynamic interactions between a sedimenting microswimmer and a solid wall have ubiquitous biological and technological applications. A plethora of gravity-induced swimming dynamics near a planar no-slip wall provides a platform for…
Buoyancy effects in unstably stratified mixing layers express themselves through gravity currents of heavy fluid which propagate in an ambient lighter fluid. These currents are encountered in numerous geophysical flows, industrial safety…
Undulatory locomotion is a means of self-propulsion that relies on the generation and propagation of waves along a body. As a mode of locomotion it is primitive and relatively simple, yet can be remarkably robust. No wonder then, that it is…
Despite their importance in many biological, ecological and physical processes, microorganismal fluid flows under tight confinement have not been investigated experimentally. Strong screening of Stokelets in this geometry suggests that the…
Self-propelled particles have been experimentally shown to orbit spherical obstacles and move along surfaces. Here, we theoretically and numerically investigate this behavior for a hydrodynamic squirmer interacting with spherical objects…
The ciliary locomotion and feeding of an axisymmetric micro-swimmer in a complex fluid whose viscosity depends on nutrient concentration are investigated numerically. The micro-swimmer is modeled as having spheroidal geometry, and ciliary…
Across the stable density stratification of the abyssal ocean, deep dense water is slowly propelled upward by sustained, though irregular, turbulent mixing. The resulting mean upwelling determines large-scale oceanic circulation properties…
Collective motion is a phenomenon observed across length scales in nature, from bacterial swarming and tissue migration to the flocking of animals. The mechanisms underlying this behavior vary significantly depending on the biological…
We study the dynamics and interaction of two swimming bacteria, modeled by self-propelled dumbbell-type structures. We focus on alignment dynamics of a coplanar pair of elongated swimmers, which propel themselves either by pushing" or…
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…
Turbulence plays a major role in shaping marine community structure as it affects organism dispersal and guides fundamental ecological interactions. Below oceanographic mesoscale dynamics, turbulence also impinges on subtle…
Oceanic turbulence influences the transport and mixing of freshwater, heat, nutrients, and other biogeochemical tracers. It also has broader implications for oceanic and atmospheric circulations. Tides contribute substantially to the…
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…
Dynamical systems theory approach has been successfully used in physical oceanography for the last two decades to study mixing and transport of water masses in the ocean. The basic theoretical ideas have been borrowed from the phenomenon of…
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…
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…
In this letter we propose a kinematic model to show how collisions with a surface and rotational Brownian motion give rise to the accumulation of micro-swimmers near a surface. In this model, an elongated microswimmer invariably travels…
We study the collective motion of confined spherical microswimmers such as active colloids which we model by so-called squirmers. To simulate hydrodynamic flow fields including thermal noise, we use the method of multi-particle collision…
In a recent letter (Friedrich et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 109:138102, 2012), a minimal model swimmer was proposed that propels itself at low Reynolds numbers by a revolving motion of a pair of spheres. The motion of the two spheres can…
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.…