Related papers: Stirring by swimmers in confined microenvironments
Organisms that locomote by propagating waves of body bending can maintain performance across heterogeneous environments by modifying their gait frequency $\omega$ or wavenumber $k$. We identify a unifying relationship between these…
Many active matter systems are known to perform L\'{e}vy walks during migration or foraging. Such superdiffusive transport indicates long-range correlated dynamics. These behavior patterns have been observed for microswimmers such as…
Space dependent diffusion of micrometer sized particles has been directly observed using digital video microscopy. The particles were trapped between two nearly parallel walls making their confinement position dependent. Consequently, not…
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.…
It is by now well understood that large sprite discharges at the low air densities of the mesosphere are physically similar to small streamer discharges in air at standard temperature and pressure. This similarity is based on Townsend…
Micron-sized self-propelled (active) particles can be considered as model systems for characterizing more complex biological organisms like swimming bacteria or motile cells. We produce asymmetric microswimmers by soft lithography and study…
Dense bacterial suspensions exhibit turbulent-like flows at low Reynolds numbers, driven by the activity of the microswimmers. In this study, we develop a model system to examine these dynamics using motile colloids that mimic bacterial…
We use numerical simulations to probe the dynamics of concentrated suspensions of spherical microswimmers interacting hydrodynamically. Previous work in the dilute limit predicted orientational instabilities of aligned suspensions for both…
Run-and-tumble is a common but vital strategy that bacteria employ to explore environment suffused with boundaries, as well as to escape from entrapment. In this study we reveal how this strategy and the resulting dynamical behavior can be…
Restrictions to molecular motion by barriers (membranes) are ubiquitous in biological tissues, porous media and composite materials. A major challenge is to characterize the microstructure of a material or an organism nondestructively using…
In this fluid dynamics video, we demonstrate the microscale mixing enhancement of passive tracer particles in suspensions of swimming microalgae, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. These biflagellated, single-celled eukaryotes (10 micron diameter)…
We study active agents embedded in bulk or in confinement explicitly considering hydrodynamics and simulating the swimmers via an implementation inspired by the squirmer model. We develop a Dissipative Particle Dynamics scheme for the…
We use a three-bead-spring model to investigate the dynamics of bi-flagellate micro-swimmers near a surface. While the primary dynamics and scattering are governed by geometric-dependent direct contact, the fluid flows generated by the…
Geometric confinement plays an important role in the dynamics of natural and synthetic microswimmers from bacterial cells to self-propelled particles in high-throughput microfluidic devices. However, little is known about the effects of…
We present a scheme of self-propelling liquid droplets which closely mimics the locomotion of some protozoal organisms, so-called squirmers. In contrast to other schemes proposed earlier, locomotion paths are not self-avoiding, since the…
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…
Microswimmers typically operate in complex environments. In biological systems, often diverse species are simultaneously present and interact with each other. Here, we derive a (time-dependent) particle-scale statistical description, namely…
We analyze the dynamics of a tracer particle embedded in a bath of hard spheres confined in a channel of varying section. By means of Brownian dynamics simulations we apply a constant force on the tracer particle and discuss the dependence…
It has been shown that a nanoliter chamber separated by a wall of asymmetric obstacles can lead to an inhomogeneous distribution of self-propelled microorganisms. Although it is well established that this rectification effect arises from…
We analyse how simple local constraints in two dimensions lead a defect to exhibit robust, non-transient, and tunable, subdiffusion. We uncover a rich dynamical phenomenology realised in ice- and dimer-type models. On the microscopic scale…