Related papers: L\'evy Fluctuations and Tracer Diffusion in Dilute…
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)…
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…
Brownian motion is widely used as a paradigmatic model of diffusion in equilibrium media throughout the physical, chemical, and biological sciences. However, many real world systems, particularly biological ones, are intrinsically…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Bacterial swarms display intriguing dynamical states like active turbulence. Using a hydrodynamic model we now show that such dense active suspensions manifest super-diffusion, via L\'evy walks, which masquerades as a crossover from…
Suspensions of microswimmers are a rich source of fascinating new fluid mechanics. Recently we predicted the active pipe flow dispersion of gyrotactic microalgae, whose orientation is biased by gravity and flow shear. Analytical theory…
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…
The combined impact of axial stretching and cross-stream diffusion on the downstream transport of solute is termed Taylor dispersion. The dispersion of active suspensions is qualitatively distinct: viscous and external torques can establish…
Many active matter systems are known to perform L\'{e}vy walks during migration or foraging. Such superdiffusive transport indicates long-range correlated dynamics. These behavior patterns have been observed for microswimmers such as…
We derive the long-time dynamics of a tracer immersed in a one-dimensional active bath. In contrast to previous studies, we find that the damping and noise correlations possess long-time tails with exponents that depend on the tracer…
A topic of intense current investigation pursues the question how the highly crowded environment of biological cells affects the dynamic properties of passively diffusing particles. Motivated by recent experiments we report results of…
In the presence of a laminar shear flow, the diffusion of passive colloidal particles is enhanced in the direction parallel to the flow. This classical phenomenon is known as Taylor-Aris dispersion. Besides, microorganisms, such as active…
There is much current interest in modelling suspensions of algae and other micro-organisms for biotechnological exploitation, and many bioreactors are of tubular design. Using generalized Taylor dispersion theory, we develop a…
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…
Anomalous diffusion, manifest as a nonlinear temporal evolution of the position mean square displacement, and/or non-Gaussian features of the position statistics, is prevalent in biological transport processes. Likewise, collective behavior…
Active matter such as swarming bacteria and motile colloids exhibits exotic properties different from conventional equilibrium materials. Among these properties, the enhanced diffusion of tracer particles is generally deemed as a hallmark…