Related papers: Confinement Stabilizes a Bacterial Suspension into…
We experimentally investigate how aerotactic bacteria, confined within a thin liquid film between two solid substrates, respond to a controlled oxygen gradient. We find that the total bacterial number density dictates which mechanism…
Active matter systems under confinement display persistent surface motion and a strong boundary affinity. However, despite extensive studies of their positional dynamics, much less attention has been given to the corresponding orientational…
Coherent angular rotation of epithelial cells is thought to contribute to many vital physiological processes including tissue morphogenesis and glandular formation. However, factors regulating this motion, and the implications of this…
We study how confining the equilibrium hard-sphere fluid to restrictive one- and two-dimensional channels with smooth interacting walls modifies its structure, dynamics, and entropy using molecular dynamics and transition-matrix Monte Carlo…
Systems in which particles can self-assemble into mono- or bilayers can form variety of stable and metastable structures on a nanometer length scale. For this reason confinement has a particularly strong effect on such systems. We discuss…
Controlling the phases of matter is a challenge that spans from condensed materials to biological systems. Here, by imposing a geometric boundary condition, we study controlled collective motion of Escherichia coli bacteria. A circular…
We investigate the emergence of global alignment in colonies of dividing rod-shaped cells under confinement. Using molecular dynamics simulations and continuous modeling, we demonstrate that geometrical anisotropies in the confining…
Active droplets are artificial microswimmers built from a liquid dispersion by microfluidic tools and showing self-propelled motion. These systems hold particular interest for mimicking biological phenomena, such as some aspects of cell…
Cavitation is a common phenomenon in nature and has numerous applications. In contrast to a cavitation bubble in a free domain, a cavitation bubble in a thin tube is restricted by the tube wall, which is expected to significantly affect…
Active hydrodynamic theories are a powerful tool to study the emergent ordered phases of internally driven particles such as bird flocks, bacterial suspension and their artificial analogues. While theories of orientationally ordered phases…
We present a molecular dynamics study of the effects of confinement on the lubrication and flow properties of ionic liquids. We use a coarse-grained salt model description of ionic liquid as a lubricant confined between finite solid plates…
As a paradigmatic model of active fluids, bacterial suspensions show intriguing rheological responses drastically different from their counterpart colloidal suspensions. Although the flow of bulk bacterial suspensions has been extensively…
We study theoretically the effects of spatial confinement on the phoretic motion of a dissolved particle driven by composition gradients generated by chemical reactions of its solvent, which are active only on certain parts of the particle…
We have studied the collective motion of polar active particles confined to ellipsoidal surfaces. The geometric constraints lead to the formation of vortices that encircle surface points of constant curvature (umbilics). We have found that…
Despite their importance in many biological, ecological and physical processes, microorganismal fluid flows under tight confinement have not been investigated experimentally. Strong screening of Stokelets in this geometry suggests that the…
We consider collective dynamics of self-propelling particles in two dimensions. They can align themselves according to the direction of propulsion of their neighbours, together with a random perturbation (i.e. rotational fluctuation). They…
Understanding how bacteria move in porous media is critical to applications in healthcare, agriculture, environmental remediation, and chemical sensing. Recent work has demonstrated that E. coli, which moves by run-and-tumble dynamics in a…
We model the effects of confinement on the stable self-organized patterns obtained in the non-equilibrium steady states of mixtures of molecular motors and microtubules. In experiments [Nedelec et al. Nature, 389, 305 (1997); Surrey et al.,…
Active systems comprised of self-propelled units show fascinating transitions from Brownian-like dynamics to collective coherent motion. Swirling of swimming bacteria is a spectacular example. This study demonstrates that a nematic liquid…
The formation of (bio)molecular condensates via liquid-liquid phase separation in cells has received increasing attention, as these coacervates play important functional and regulatory roles within biological systems. However, the majority…