Related papers: Finding the ciliary beating pattern with optimal e…

Several micro-organisms, such as bacteria, algae, or spermatozoa, use flagella or cilia to swim in a fluid, while many other micro-organisms instead use ample shape deformation, described as amoeboid, to propel themselves by either crawling…

Metachronal swimming, the sequential beating of limbs with a small phase lag, is observed in many organisms at various scales, but has been studied mostly in the limits of high or low Reynolds numbers. Motivated by the swimming of brine…

Biological flapping wing fliers operate efficiently and robustly in a wide range of flight conditions and are a great source of inspiration to engineers. The unsteady aerodynamics of flapping-wings are dominated by large-scale vortical…

Kiiking is an extreme sport in which athletes alternate between standing and squatting to pump a standing swing till it is inverted and completes a rotation. A minimal model of the sport may be cast in terms of the control of an actively…

The propulsion of many eukaryotic cells is generated by flagella, flexible slender filaments that are actively oscillating in space and time. The dynamics of these biological appendages have inspired the design of many types of artificial…

For natural microswimmers, the interplay of swimming activity and external flow can promote robust motion, e.g. propulsion against ("upstream rheotaxis") or perpendicular to the direction of flow. These effects are generally attributed to…

We investigate the competing effects of simultaneous presence of chirality and generalised tumbles in the dynamics of an active Brownian particle. Chiral active particles perform circular motions that give rise to slow transport at late…

High-throughput experimental techniques and bioinformatics tools make it possible to obtain reconstructions of the metabolism of microbial species. Combined with mathematical frameworks such as flux balance analysis, which assumes that…

Many active biological particles, such as swimming microorganisms or motor-proteins, do work on their environment by going though a periodic sequence of shapes. Interactions between particles can lead to the phase-synchronization of their…

Distributing points on a (possibly high-dimensional) sphere with minimal energy is a long-standing problem in and outside the field of mathematics. This paper considers a novel energy function that arises naturally from statistics and…

Particle filtering is a popular method for inferring latent states in stochastic dynamical systems, whose theoretical properties have been well studied in machine learning and statistics communities. In many control problems, e.g.,…

Microswimmers typically operate in complex environments. In biological systems, often diverse species are simultaneously present and interact with each other. Here, we derive a (time-dependent) particle-scale statistical description, namely…

A method for the optimisation and advanced studies of a laser-plasma electron injector is presented, based on a truncated ionisation injection scheme for high quality beam production. The SMILEI code is used with laser envelope…

Actuating periodically an elastic filament in a viscous liquid generally breaks the constraints of Purcell's scallop theorem, resulting in the generation of a net propulsive force. This observation suggests a method to design simple…

A general condition determining the optimal performance of a complex system has not yet been found and the possibility of its existence is unknown. To contribute in this direction, an optimization algorithm as a complex system is presented.…

We study the statistics of the efficiency in a class of isothermal cyclic machines with realistic coupling between the internal degrees of freedom. We derive, under fairly general assumptions, the probability distribution function for the…

Minimising the energy consumption associated with periodic motion is a priority common to a wide range of technologies and organisms - among them, many species of flying insect, for which flapping-wing flight is a life-essential mode of…

The transport of bio-particles in viscous flows exhibits a rich variety of dynamical behaviour, such as morphological transitions, complex orientation dynamics or deformations. Characterising such complex behaviour under well controlled…

The energetically most efficient way how a deformed red blood cell regains equilibrium is mathematically described by the gradient flow of the Canham-Helfrich functional, including a spontaneous curvature and the conservation of surface…

The swimming properties of an E. coli-type model bacterium are investigated by mesoscale hy- drodynamic simulations, combining molecular dynamics simulations of the bacterium with the multiparticle particle collision dynamics method for the…