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

Motile cilia drive biological fluid transport through whip-like beating motions that synchronize into metachronal waves. The lengths of these cilia span three orders of magnitude, from microns in human airways to millimeters in ctenophores.…

Active diffusiophoresis - swimming through interaction with a self-generated, neutral, solute gradient - is a paradigm for autonomous motion at the micrometer scale. We study this propulsion mechanism within a linear response theory.…

We study the fluid dynamics of two fish-like bodies with synchronised swimming patterns. Our studies are based on two-dimensional simulations of viscous incompressible flows. We distinguish between motion patterns that are externally…

We introduce a model system of stochastic entities, called 'rowers' which include some essentialities of the behavior of real cilia. We introduce and discuss the problem of symmetry breaking for these objects and its connection with the…

Motile cilia are slender, hair-like cellular appendages that spontaneously oscillate under the action of internal molecular motors and are typically found in dense arrays. These active filaments coordinate their beating to generate…

In this paper we theoretically investigate underlying assumptions that have been used for designing adaptive particle swarm optimization algorithms in the past years. We relate these assumptions to the movement patterns of particles…

Suspensions of unicellular microswimmers such as flagellated bacteria or motile algae exhibit spontaneous density heterogeneities at large enough concentrations. Based on the relative location of the biological actuation appendages i.e.…

We study the microscale propulsion of a rotating helical filament confined by a cylindrical tube, using a boundary-element method for Stokes flow that accounts for helical symmetry. We determine the effect of confinement on swimming speed…

Jellyfish (Medusozoa) have been deemed the most energy-efficient animals in the world. Their bell morphology and relatively simple nervous systems make them attractive to robotocists. Although, the science community has devoted much…

Eukaryotes swim with coordinated flagellar (ciliary) beating and steer by fine-tuning the coordination. The model organism for studying flagellate motility, C. reinhardtii (CR), employs synchronous, breast-stroke-like flagellar beating to…

Recently, it has been shown that entropy can be used to sort Brownian particles according to their size. In particular, a combination of a static and a time-dependent force applied on differently sized particles which are confined in an…

Swimming microorganisms often have to propel in complex, non-Newtonian fluids. We carry out experiments with self-propelling helical swimmers driven by an externally rotating magnetic field in shear-thinning, inelastic fluids. Similarly to…

Optimizing the energy efficiency of driving processes provides valuable insights into the underlying physics and is of crucial importance for numerous applications, from biological processes to the design of machines and robots. Knowledge…

Brownian particles interacting sequentially with distinct temperatures and driving forces at each stroke have been tackled as a reliable alternative for the construction of engine setups. However they can behave very inefficiently depending…

The rheological response under simple shear of an active suspension of Escherichia coli is determined in a large range of shear rates and concentrations. The effective viscosity and the time scales characterizing the bacterial organization…

A Brownian information machine extracts work from a heat bath through a feedback process that exploits the information acquired in a measurement. For the paradigmatic case of a particle trapped in a harmonic potential, we determine how…

Eukaryotic swimming cells such as spermatozoa, algae or protozoa use flagella or cilia to move in viscous fluids. The motion of their flexible appendages in the surrounding fluid induces propulsive forces that balance with the viscous drag…

Synchronization plays a crucial role in the dynamics of living organisms, from fireflies flashing in unison to pacemaker cells that jointly generate heartbeats. Uncovering the mechanism behind these phenomena requires an understanding of…

The article is devoted to the problem of applying the maximum principle for finding optimal control parameters in simulation tasks of interest for a variety of engineering and industrial systems and processes. Especially important is the…

Interactions between swimming cells and surfaces are essential to many microbiological processes, from bacterial biofilm formation to human fertilization. However, in spite of their fundamental importance, relatively little is known about…