Related papers: Stirring by squirmers
The habitat of microorganisms is typically complex and viscoelastic. A natural question arises: Do polymers in a suspension of active swimmers enhance chaotic motion or promote orientational order? We address this issue by performing…
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…
Here we characterize the motility of athermal swimming droplets within the framework of active rotational diffusion. Just like active colloids, their trajectories can be modeled with a constant velocity $V$ and a slow angular diffusion, but…
We study the dynamics and the statistics of dilute suspensions of gyrotactic swimmers, a model for many aquatic motile microorganisms. By means of extensive numerical simulations of the Navier-Stokes equations at different Reynolds numbers,…
We reconsider fluid dynamics for a self-propulsive swimmer in Stokes flow. With an exact definition of deformation of a swimmer, a proof is given to Purcell's scallop theorem including the body rotation. The breakdown of the theorem due to…
Many microorganisms swim through gels and non-Newtonian fluids in their natural environments. In this paper, we focus on microorganisms which use flagella for propulsion. We address how swimming velocities are affected in nonlinearly…
In their search for metabolic resources microbes swim through viscous environments that present physical anisotropies, including steric obstacles across a wide range of sizes. Hydrodynamic forces are known to significantly alter swimmer…
Many microorganisms take a chiral path while swimming in an ambient uid. In this paper, we study the combined behavior of two chiral swimmers using the well-known squirmer model taking into account chiral asymmetries. In contrast to the…
Microswimmers exhibit an intriguing, highly-dynamic collective motion with large-scale swirling and streaming patterns, denoted as active turbulence -- reminiscent of classical high-Reynolds-number hydrodynamic turbulence. Various…
The majority of studies on self-propelled particles and microswimmers concentrates on objects that do not feature a deterministic bending of their trajectory. However, perfect axial symmetry is hardly found in reality, and shape-asymmetric…
Active propulsion, as performed by bacteria and Janus particles, in combination with hydrodynamic interaction results in the accumulation of bacteria at a flat wall. However, in microfluidic devices with cylindrical pillars of sufficiently…
Complex or hostile environments can sometimes inhibit the movement capabilities of diffusive particles or active swimmers, who may thus become stuck in fixed positions. This occurs, for example, in the adhesion of bacteria to surfaces at…
We use high-speed x-ray imaging to reveal how a small (~10cm) desert dwelling lizard, the sandfish (Scincus scincus), swims within a granular medium [1]. On the surface, the lizard uses a standard diagonal gait, but once below the surface,…
We perform hydrodynamic simulations using the method of multi-particle collision dynamics and a theoretical analysis to study a single squirmer microswimmer at high P\'eclet number, which moves in a low Reynolds number fluid and under…
Swimming cells often have to self-propel through fluids displaying non-Newtonian rheology. While past theoretical work seems to indicate that stresses arising from complex fluids should systematically hinder low-Reynolds number locomotion,…
We study experimentally and theoretically mixing at the external boundary of a submerged turbulent jet. In the experimental study we use Particle Image Velocimetry and an Image Processing Technique based on the analysis of the intensity of…
We study the dynamics of gyrotactic microswimmers suspended in homogeneous and isotropic turbulence by using direct numerical simulations (DNS). The swimmers are characterized by three non-dimensional parameters: their aspect ratio…
Microswimmers are often found in heterogeneous and crowded environments within narrow conduits under external flow conditions, enabling them to perform interesting translational and rotational maneuvers, such as swimming in the upstream…
The effect of crowding on the run-and-tumble dynamics of swimmers such as bacteria is studied using a discrete lattice model of mutually excluding particles that move with constant velocity along a direction that is randomized at a rate…
Microswimmers in suspension exhibit collective swimming behaviour, forming various self-organised structures including ordered, aggregated, and turbulent-like structures. When mixed with passive particles phase-separation is known to occur,…