Related papers: Using self-driven microswimmers for particle separ…
A new mechanism for micro-swimmer motion in an aquatic environment, which implies light-induced polarization perturbations as a motivation for its motion, is proposed. The mechanism assumes that natural light leads to an enhancement of the…
Biological and synthetic microswimmers display a wide range of swimming trajectories depending on driving forces and torques. In this paper we consider a simple overdamped model of self-propelled particles with a constant self-propulsion…
Bacteria can exploit mechanics to display remarkable plasticity in response to locally changing physical and chemical conditions. Compliant structures play a striking role in their taxis behavior, specifically for navigation inside complex…
Recent advancements in active colloidal systems aim to mimic key characteristics of biological microswimmers, particularly their adaptive motility in response to environmental changes. While many approaches rely on externally imposing a…
Biofilms are spatially organized microorganism colonies embedded in a self-produced matrix, conferring to the microbial community resistance to environmental stresses. Motile bacteria have been observed swimming in the matrix of pathogenic…
The motion of a pair of micro-wedges ("carriers") in a turbulent bacterial bath is explored using computer simulations with explicit modeling of the bacteria and experiments. The orientation of the two micro-wedges is parallel and fixed by…
Many biological microswimmers locomote by periodically beating the densely-packed cilia on their cell surface in a wave-like fashion. While the swimming mechanisms of ciliated microswimmers have been extensively studied both from the…
A key goal in developing molecular microrobots that mimic real-world animal dynamic behavior is to understand better the self-continuous progressive motion resulting from collective molecular transformation. This study reports, for the…
It is numerically investigated whether a deformable object can propel itself in a superfluid. Articulated bodies and multi-component condensates are examined as swimmers. An articulated two-body swimmer cannot obtain locomotion without…
Both natural and artificial small-scale swimmers may often self-propel in environments subject to complex geometrical constraints. While most past theoretical work on low-Reynolds number locomotion addressed idealised geometrical…
Microorganisms can preferentially orient and move along gradients of a chemo-attractant (i.e., chemotax) while colonies of many microorganisms can collectively undergo complex dynamics in response to chemo-attractants that they themselves…
Synthetic microswimmers show great promise in biomedical applications such as drug delivery and microsurgery. Their locomotion, however, is subject to stringent constraints due to the dominance of viscous over inertial forces at low…
Active matter comprises self-driven units, such as bacteria and synthetic microswimmers, that can spontaneously form complex patterns and assemble into functional microdevices. These processes are possible thanks to the out-of-equilibrium…
We present a detailed numerical study of a microscopic artificial swimmer realized recently by Dreyfus et al. in experiments [R. Dreyfus et al., Nature 437, 862 (2005)]. It consists of an elastic filament composed of superparamagnetic…
Microorganisms ofter move in confined, disordered environments, where hydrodynamic couplings can modify their transport behavior. Using extensive finite-element simulations, we investigate the dynamics of microswimmers -- modeled as…
We introduce a system of light driven microscopic autonomous moving particles that move on a flat surface. The design is simple, yet effective: Micrometer sized objects with wedge shape are produced by photopolymerization, they are covered…
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…
The ability to propel against flows, i.e., to perform positive rheotaxis, can provide exciting opportunities for applications in targeted therapeutics and non-invasive surgery. To date, no biocompatible technologies exist for navigating…
The behavior of living systems is based on the experience they gained through their interactions with the environment [1]. This experience is stored in the complex biochemical networks of cells and organisms to provide a relationship…
Non-equilibrium dynamics of topological defects can be used as a fundamental propulsion mechanism in microscopic active matter. Here, we demonstrate swimming of topological defect-propelled colloidal particles in (passive) nematic fluids…