Related papers: Sorting of Chiral Microswimmers
The swimming direction of biological or artificial microscale swimmers tends to be randomised over long time-scales by thermal fluctuations. Bacteria use various strategies to bias swimming behaviour and achieve directed motion against a…
We experimentally study the motion of light-activated colloidal microswimmers in a viscoelastic fluid. We find that, in such a non-Newtonian environment, the active colloids undergo an unexpected transition from enhanced angular diffusion…
Topologically nontrivial field configurations called "baby skyrmions" behave like particles and give origins to the field of skyrmionics that promises racetrack memory and other technological applications. Unraveling the non-equilibrium…
Microscopic active droplets are of interest since they can be used to transport matter from one point to another. The challenge is to control the trajectory. In this work, we demonstrate an approach to control the direction of active…
Flagellated bacteria are hydrodynamically attracted to rigid walls, yet past work shows a 'hovering' state where they swim stably at a finite height above surfaces. We use numerics and theory to reveal the physical origin of hovering.…
Self-propelled micron-size particles suspended in a fluid, like bacteria or synthetic microswimmers, are strongly non-equilibrium systems where particle motility breaks the microscopic detailed balance, often resulting in large-scale…
We investigate configuration dynamics of a flexible polymer chain in a bath of active particles with dynamic chirality, i.e., particles rotate with a deterministic angular velocity $\omega$ besides self-propulsion,by Langevin dynamics…
Active crystals are highly ordered structures that emerge from the self-organization of motile objects, and have been widely studied in synthetic and bacterial active matter. Whether collective crystallization phenomena can occur in groups…
We study catalytic Janus swimmers and Escherichia coli bacteria swimming in a two-dimensional colloidal crystal. The Janus swimmers orbit individual colloids and hop between colloids stochastically, with a hopping rate that varies inversely…
Chiral fluids - such as fluids under rotation or a magnetic field as well as synthetic and biological active fluids - flow in a different way than ordinary ones. Due to symmetries broken at the microscopic level, chiral fluids may have…
The flagellated bacterium Escherichia coli is increasingly used experimentally as a self-propelled swimmer. To obtain meaningful, quantitative results that are comparable between different laboratories, reproducible protocols are needed to…
We report the first experimental realization of a chiral artificial microswimmer exhibiting the helical motion. We found that a cholesteric liquid crystal droplet with a helical director field swims in a helical path driven by the Marangoni…
From bacteria and sperm cells to artificial microrobots, self-propelled microscopic objects at low Reynolds numbers often perceive fluctuating mechanical and chemical stimuli and contact exterior wall boundaries both in nature and the…
The presence of obstacles is intuitively expected to hinder the diffusive transport of micro-swimmers. However, for chiral micro-swimmers, a low density of obstacles near a surface can enhance their diffusive behavior, due to the…
Many biological microswimmers can modulate their swimming gait to achieve directional control of motility, especially when performing steering towards specific directional cues. This can be achieved without the need for obvious…
Biological and artificial microswimmers often self-propel in external flows of vortical nature; relevant examples include algae in small-scale ocean eddies, spermatozoa in uterine peristaltic flows and bacteria in microfluidic devices. A…
The collective motion of bacterial cells in a shallow circular pool is systematically studied using the bacterial species $Bacillus$ $subtilis$. The ratio of cell length to pool diameter (i.e., the reduced cell length) ranges from 0.06 to…
When a millimetric body is placed atop a vibrating liquid bath, the relative motion between the object and interface generates outward propagating waves with an associated momentum flux. Prior work has shown that isolated chiral objects,…
The dynamics of swimming bacteria depend on the properties of their habitat media. Recently it was shown that the motion of swimming bacteria dispersed directly in a non-toxic water-based lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal can be controlled…
Locomotion is essential for living cells. It enables bacteria and algae to explore space for food, cancer to spread, and immune system to fight infections. Motile cells display trajectories of intriguing complexity, from regular (e.g.…