Related papers: Influence of swimming strategy on microorganism se…
Suitable asymmetric microstructures can be used to control the direction of motion in microorganism populations. This rectification process makes it possible to accumulate swimmers in a region of space or to sort different swimmers. Here we…
Natural habitats of most living microorganisms are distinguished by a complex structure often formed by a porous medium such as soil. The dynamics and transport properties of motile microorganisms are strongly affected by crowded and…
Swimming cells and microorganisms must often move though complex fluids that contain an immersed microstructure such as polymer molecules, or filaments. In many important biological processes, such as mammalian reproduction and bacterial…
The trajectories of microswimmers moving in narrow channels of widths comparable to their sizes are significantly altered when they encounter another microswimmer moving in the opposite direction. The consequence of these encounters is a…
Understanding the transport properties of microorganisms and self-propelled particles in porous media has important implications for human health as well as microbial ecology. In free space, most microswimmers perform diffusive random walks…
We study different types of microswimmers moving in channels with varying cross section and thereby interacting hydrodynamically with the channel walls. Starting from the Smoluchowski equation for a dilute suspension, for which interactions…
Active propulsion, as performed by bacteria and Janus particles, in combination with hydrodynamic interaction results in the accumulation of bacteria at a flat wall. However, in microfluidic devices with cylindrical pillars of sufficiently…
Micro- and nano-swimmers moving in a fluid solvent confined by structures that produce entropic barriers are often described by overdamped active Brownian particle dynamics, where viscous effects are large and inertia plays no role.…
The spatial and orientational distribution in a dilute active suspension of non-Brownian run-and-tumble spherical swimmers confined between two planar hard walls is calculated theoretically. Using a kinetic model based on coupled…
Biological microswimmers often encounter deformable boundaries in physiological conditions; for instance, the viscoelastic walls of reproductive tract during migration of spermatozoa, or host tissue during early bacterial biofilm formation.…
The effect of crowding on the run-and-tumble dynamics of swimmers such as bacteria is studied using a discrete lattice model of mutually excluding particles that move with constant velocity along a direction that is randomized at a rate…
Media and membranes composed of micrometric-diameter pores are well known in academia and industry to be capable of efficacious nanofiltration of fluids once the pore inner surfaces are coated with nanostructures. Given the large mismatch…
We show that the recent experimental observation of the rectification of swimming bacteria in a system with an array of asymmetric barriers occurs due to the ballistic component of the bacteria trajectories introduced by the bacterial…
Micro-organisms expend energy moving through complex media. While propulsion speed is an important property of locomotion, efficiency is another factor that may determine the swimming gait adopted by a micro-organism in order to locomote in…
Spontaneous segregation of run-and-tumble particles with different velocities in microchannels is investigated by numerical simulations. Self-propelled particles are known to accumulate in the proximity of walls. Here we show how fast…
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.…
The diffusion of active microscopic organisms in complex environments plays an important role in a wide range of biological phenomena from cell colony growth to single organism transport. Here, we investigate theoretically and…
Run-and-tumble dynamics is a wide-spread mechanism of swimming bacteria. The accumulation of run-and-tumble microswimmers near impermeable surfaces is studied theoretically and numerically in the low-density limit in two and three spatial…
In their search for metabolic resources microbes swim through viscous environments that present physical anisotropies, including steric obstacles across a wide range of sizes. Hydrodynamic forces are known to significantly alter swimmer…
Micro-swimmers such as bacteria perform random walks known as run-and-tumbles to move up chemo-attractant gradients and as a result aggregate with others. It is also known that such micro-swimmers can self-organize into macroscopic patterns…