Related papers: Capturing self-propelled particles in a moving mic…
For many applications, it is important to catch collections of autonomously navigating microbes and man-made microswimmers in a controlled way. Here we propose an efficient trap to collectively capture self-propelled colloidal rods. By…
A colloidal particle driven by externally actuated rotation can self-propel parallel to a rigid boundary by exploiting the hydrodynamic coupling that surfaces induce between translation and rotation. As such a roller moves along the…
The acoustofluidic method holds great promise for manipulating microorganisms. When exposed to the steady vortex structures of acoustic streaming flow, these microorganisms exhibit intriguing dynamic behaviors, such as hydrodynamic trapping…
Collective behavior of self-propelled particles is observed on a microscale for swimmers such as sperm and bacteria as well as for protein filaments in motility assays. The properties of such systems depend both on their dimensionality and…
It is known that obstacles can hydrodynamically trap bacteria and synthetic microswimmers in orbits, where the trapping time heavily depends on the swimmer flow field and noise is needed to escape the trap. Here, we use experiments and…
Transport of tracer particles through mesh-like environments such as biological hydrogels and polymer matrices is ubiquitous in nature. These tracers could be passive, such as colloids or active (self-propelled), such as synthetic…
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…
Motivated by recent simulations and by experiments on aggregation of gliding bacteria, we study a model of the collective dynamics of self-propelled hard rods on a substrate in two dimensions. The rods have finite size, interact via…
Self-propelled particles can exhibit surprising non-equilibrium behaviors, and how they interact with obstacles or boundaries remains an important open problem. Here we show that chemically propelled micro-rods can be captured, with little…
The motion of flexible fibers through structured fluidic environments is ubiquitous in nature and industrial applications. Most often, their dynamics results from the complex interplay between internal elastic stresses, contact forces and…
We present an experimental realization of the collective trapping phase transition [Kaiser et al., PRL 108, 268307 (2012)], using motile polar granular rods in the presence of a V-shaped obstacle. We offer a theory of this transition based…
Mesh-like structures, such as mucus gel or cytoskeleton networks, are ubiquitous in biological systems. These intricate structures are composed of cross-linked, semi-flexible bio-filaments, crucial to numerous biological processes. In many…
We study numerically how multiple deformable capsules squeeze into a constriction. This situation is largely encountered in microfluidic chips designed to manipulate living cells, which are soft entities. We use fully three-dimensional…
The dynamics of an active walker in a harmonic potential is studied experimentally, numerically and theoretically. At odds with usual models of self-propelled particles, we identify two dynamical states for which the particle condensates at…
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…
In the absence of inertia, a reciprocal swimmer achieves no net motion in a viscous Newtonian fluid. Here, we investigate the ability of a reciprocally actuated particle to translate through a complex fluid that possesses a network using…
Asymmetric obstacles can be exploited to direct the motion and induce sorting of run-and-tumbling particles. In this work, we show that flocking particles which follow the Vicsek model aligning rules experience a collective trapping in the…
Dense suspensions of self-propelled rod-like particles exhibit a fascinating variety of non-equilibrium phenomena. By means of computer simulations of a minimal model for rigid self-propelled colloidal rods with variable shape we explore…
Inertial particles are often observed to be trapped, temporarily or permanently, by recirculation cells which are ubiquitous in natural or industrial flows. In the limit of small particle inertia, determining the conditions of trapping is a…
A particle driven by active self-propulsion can be subject to inhomogeneous potential fields, steering its orientation and leading to confinement and eventual trapping. Analytical treatment of capture and/or release dynamics for general…