Related papers: Stirring by swimmers in confined microenvironments
We formulate a scaling theory for the long-time diffusive motion in a space occluded by a high density of moving obstacles in dimensions 1, 2 and 3. Our tracers diffuse anomalously over many decades in time, before reaching a diffusive…
We have developed a minimal model of a swimmer without body deformation based on force and torque dipoles which allows accurate 3D Navier-Stokes calculations. Our model can reproduce swimmer propulsion for a large range of Reynolds numbers,…
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…
Hydrodynamic interactions are crucial for determining the cooperative behavior of microswimmers at low Reynolds numbers. Here we provide a comprehensive analysis of the scaling and strength of the interactions in the case of a pair of…
Microorganisms navigate through fluid, often confined by complex environments, to survive and sustain life. Inspired by this fact, we consider a model system and seek to understand the wall curvature driven dynamics of a squirmer, a…
Most classical work on the hydrodynamics of low-Reynolds-number swimming addresses deterministic locomotion in quiescent environments. Thermal fluctuations in fluids are known to lead to a Brownian loss of the swimming direction. As most…
The persistent character of the motion of active particles gives rise to accumulation at boundaries. I investigate the problem of run-and-tumble swimmers confined in a 1D box with hard walls, reporting expressions for the particles…
Turbulence is ubiquitous, from oceanic currents to small-scale biological and quantum systems. Self-sustained turbulent motion in microbial suspensions presents an intriguing example of collective dynamical behavior amongst the simplest…
We study the diffusion of a Brownian probe particle of size $R$ in a dilute dispersion of active Brownian particles (ABPs) of size $a$, characteristic swim speed $U_0$, reorientation time $\tau_R$, and mechanical energy $k_s T_s = \zeta_a…
We study numerically the hydrodynamics of a self-propelled particle system, consisting of spherical squirmers sedimented on a flat surface. We observe the emergence of dynamic structures, due to the interplay of particle-particle and…
We find the mixing induced by a small swimming organism in a density stratified fluid. We model the swimmer as a spherical squirmer and quantify mixing through a mixing efficiency that is the ratio of rate of change of potential energy of…
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 motility is widely used by swimming microorganisms including numerous prokaryotic eukaryotic organisms. Here, we experimentally investigate the run-and-tumble dynamics of the bacterium E. coli in polymeric solutions. We find…
Using a fluid-particle dynamics approach, we numerically study the effects of hydrodynamic interactions on the collective dynamics of active suspensions within a simple model for bacterial motility: each microorganism is modeled as a…
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 incessant swimming motion of microbes in dense suspensions can give rise to striking collective motions and coherent structures. However, theoretical investigations of these structures typically utilize either computationally demanding…
Swimming in circles occurs in a variety of situations at low Reynolds number. Here we propose a simple model for a swimmer that undergoes circular motion, generalising the model of a linear swimmer proposed by Najafi and Golestanian (Phys.…
Macromolecular diffusion in strongly confined geometries and crowded environments is still to a large extent an open subject in soft matter physics and biology. In this paper, we employ large-scale Langevin dynamics simulations to…
Many swimming bacteria naturally inhabit confined environments, yet how confinement influences their swimming behaviors remains unclear. Here, we combine experiments, continuum modeling and particle-based simulations to investigate…
We report on the Lagrangian statistics of acceleration of small (sub-Kolmogorov) bubbles and tracer particles with Stokes number St << 1 in turbulent flow. At decreasing Reynolds number, the bubble accelerations show deviations from that of…