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In the pathogenic parasite Trypanosoma brucei, a laterally attached flagellum drives rapid deformation of the complex cell body, producing puzzling dynamics. High-speed defocusing imaging reveals that surface points trace flower-like…

Self-propelled bacteria are marvels of nature with a potential to power dynamic materials and microsystems of the future. The challenge is in commanding their chaotic behavior. By dispersing swimming Bacillus subtilis in a…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2016-12-21 Chenhui Peng , Taras Turiv , Yubing Guo , Qi-Huo Wei , Oleg D. Lavrentovich

The cell body of flagellated microalgae is commonly considered to act merely as a passive load during swimming, and a larger body size would simply reduce the speed. In this work, we use numerical simulations based on a boundary element…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2026-01-28 Xiaoping Hu , Zhaorong Liu , Da Wei , Shiyuan Hu

Inspired by dense contractile tissues, where cells are subject to periodic deformation, we formulate and study a generic hydrodynamic theory of pulsating active liquids. Combining mechanical and phenomenological arguments, we postulate that…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-09-25 Tirthankar Banerjee , Thibault Desaleux , Jonas Ranft , Étienne Fodor

Active swimmers are ubiquitous in nature, found in many diverse biological systems ranging from bacteria to vertebrate fish. Of particular importance are sperm cells which are swimmers that are crucial for the survival of many species…

Biological Physics · Physics 2017-11-15 James L. Kingsley , Utkan Demirci , Erkan Tuzel

The swimming of a sphere by means of tangential helical waves running along its surface is studied on the basis of the Stokes equations. Two types of tangential waves are found. The first of these is associated with a pressure disturbance…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2016-01-06 B. U. Felderhof

The run-and-tumble dynamics of bacteria, as exhibited by \textit{E. coli}, offers a simple experimental realization of non-Brownian, yet diffusive, particles. Here we present some analytic and numerical results for models of the ideal…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2009-08-12 J. Tailleur , M. E. Cates

A number of swimming microorganisms such as ciliates ($\textit{Opalina}$) and multicellular colonies of flagellates ($\textit{Volvox}$) are approximately spherical in shape and swim using beating arrays of cilia or short flagella covering…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2014-02-06 On Shun Pak , Eric Lauga

Simulations of over $10^3$ hydrodynamically coupled solid spheres are performed to investigate collective motion of linear trains and regular square arrays of particles suspended in a fluid bounded by two parallel walls. Our novel…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2008-04-29 M. Baron , J. Blawzdziewicz , E. Wajnryb

Active flexible filaments form the classical continuum framework for modelling the locomotion of spermatozoa and algae driven by the periodic oscillation of flagella. This framework also applies to the locomotion of various artificial…

Biological Physics · Physics 2025-10-14 John Severn , Eric Lauga

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…

Biological Physics · Physics 2019-09-18 Alexander Farutin , Jocelyn Etienne , Chaouqi Misbah , Pierre Recho

Microorganisms are rarely found in Nature swimming freely in an unbounded fluid. Instead, they typically encounter other organisms, hard walls, or deformable boundaries such as free interfaces or membranes. Hydrodynamic interactions between…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2013-10-21 Marcelo A. Dias , Thomas R. Powers

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…

Biological Physics · Physics 2010-04-07 Henry C. Fu , Charles W. Wolgemuth , Thomas R. Powers

In many situations bacteria move in complex environments, as for example in soils, oceans or the human gut-track microbiome. In these natural environments, carrier fluids such as mucus or reproductive fluids show complex structure…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2022-06-22 Martyna Goral , Eric Clement , Thierry Darnige , Teresa Lopez-Leon , Anke Lindner

Microscopic swimmers, e.g., chemotactic bacteria and cells, are capable of directed motion by exerting a force on their environment. For asymmetric microswimmers, e.g., bacteria, spermatozoa and many artificial active colloidal particles, a…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2013-07-09 Mite Mijalkov , Giovanni Volpe

Consider a homogenous fluid membrane, or vesicle, described by the Helfrich-Canham energy, quadratic in the mean curvature. When the membrane is axially symmetric, this energy can be viewed as an `action' describing the motion of a…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2009-11-11 Riccardo Capovilla , Jemal Guven , Efrain Rojas

Randomly moving active particles can be herded into directed motion by asymmetric geometric structures. Although such a rectification process has been extensively studied due to its fundamental, biological, and technological relevance, a…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-03-31 Satyam Anand , Xiaolei Ma , Shuo Guo , Stefano Martiniani , Xiang Cheng

In this work we introduce a stochastic model to describe directional changes in the movement of swimming bacteria. We use the probability density function (PDF) of turn angles, measured on tumbling wild-type {\it E. coli}, to build a…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2017-07-13 G. Fier , D. Hansmann , R. C. Buceta

Near-field hydrodynamic interactions between bacteria and no-slip solid surfaces are the main mechanism underlying surface entrapment of bacteria. In this study, we employ a chiral two-body model to simulate bacterial dynamics near the…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-02-25 Baopi Liu , Lu Chen , Haiqin Wang

Although human beings have known about the phenomenon of "flocking"- that is, the coherent movement of large numbers of creatures (flocks of birds, schools of fish, herds of woolly mammoths, etc.)- since prehistoric times, it is only in the…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2018-12-04 John Toner