Related papers: Life around the scallop theorem
The self-propulsion of artificial and biological microswimmers (i.e., active colloidal particles) has often been modelled by using a force and a torque entering into the overdamped equations for the Brownian motion of passive particles.…
Temperature changes as small as $3 ^\circ$C have been observed to significantly impact how self-propelled organisms move through their environment, especially for those inhabiting the transitional flow regime in which both viscous and…
Granular packings display a wealth of mechanical features which are of widespread significance. One of these features is creep: the slow deformation under applied stress. Creep is common for many other amorphous materials such as many…
Motivated by the swimming of sperm in the non-Newtonian fluids of the female mammalian reproductive tract, we examine the swimming of filaments in the nonlinear viscoelastic Upper Convected Maxwell model. We obtain the swimming velocity and…
Many microorganisms swim in fluids with complex rheological properties. Although much is now understood about motion of these swimmers in Newtonian fluids, the understanding is still developing in non-Newtonian fluids --- this understanding…
We consider the escape of a flexible, self-avoiding polymer chain out of a confined geometry. By means of simulations, we demonstrate that the translocation time can be described by a simple scaling law that exhibits a nonlinear dependence…
Deformable boundaries are omnipresent in the habitats of swimming microorganisms, leading to intricate hydroelastic couplings. Employing a perturbation theory, valid for small deformations, we study the swimming dynamics of pushers and…
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…
A rational theory is proposed to describe the large-scale motion in turbulence. The fluid element with inner orientational structures is proposed to be the building block of fluid dynamics. The variance of the orientational structures then…
We theoretically investigate the effect of random fluctuations on the motion of elongated microswimmers near hydrodynamic transport barriers in externally-driven fluid flows. Focusing on the two-dimensional hyperbolic flow, we consider the…
Understanding the stochastic dynamics of tracer particles in active fluids is important for identifying the physical properties of flow generating objects such as colloids, bacteria or algae. Here, we study both analytically and numerically…
Local isotropy, or the statistical isotropy of small scales, is one of the basic assumptions underlying Kolmogorov's theory of universality of small-scale turbulent motion. While, until the mid-seventies or so, local isotropy was accepted…
To investigate the link between discrete, small-scale and continuous, large scale mechanical properties of a foam, we observe its two-dimensional flow in a channel, around an elliptical obstacle. We measure the drag, lift and torque acting…
A conformation space kinetic model is constructed to drive the deformation cycle of a three-sphere swimmer to achieve propulsion at low Reynolds number. We analyze the effect of an external load on the performance of this kinetic swimmer,…
An approximation to the added mass matrix of an assembly of spheres is constructed on the basis of potential flow theory for situations where one sphere is much larger than the others. In the approximation the flow potential near a small…
Consider a sequence of independent random isometries of Euclidean space with a previously fixed probability law. Apply these isometries successively to the origin and consider the sequence of random points that we obtain this way. We prove…
We present a scheme of self-propelling liquid droplets which closely mimics the locomotion of some protozoal organisms, so-called squirmers. In contrast to other schemes proposed earlier, locomotion paths are not self-avoiding, since the…
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,…
Motility is a fundamental feature of living matter, encompassing single cells and collective behavior. Such living systems are characterized by non-conservativity of energy and a large diversity of spatio-temporal patterns. Thus,…
We develop a qualitative geometric approach to swimming at low Reynolds number which avoids solving differential equations and uses instead landscape figures of two notions of curvatures: The swimming curvature and the curvature derived…