Related papers: Amoeboid motion in confined geometry
It has been argued that an extended, quasi-rigid body evolving freely in curved spacetime can deviate from its natural trajectory by simply performing cyclic deformations. More interestingly, in the limit of rapid cycles, the amount of…
We study the effect of confinement on the mean perimeter of the convex hull of a planar Brownian motion, defined as the minimum convex polygon enclosing the trajectory. We use a minimal model where an infinite reflecting wall confines the…
The investigation of collective behaviour in dense assemblies of self-propelled active particles has been motivated by a wide range of biological phenomena. Of particular interest are dynamical transitions of cellular and sub-cellular…
Bacterial swimming is well characterized in uniform liquids at rest. The natural habitat of bacterial swimmers, however, is often dominated by moving fluids and interfaces, resulting in shear flows that may strongly alter bacterial…
From bacteria and sperm cells to artificial microrobots, self-propelled microscopic objects at low Reynolds numbers often perceive fluctuating mechanical and chemical stimuli and contact exterior wall boundaries both in nature and the…
We propose a minimal model of microswimmer based on immersed boundary methods. We describe a swimmer (either pusher or puller) as a distribution of point forces, representing the swimmer's flagellum and body, with only the latter subjected…
Motile and driven particles confined in microfluidic channels exhibit interesting emergent behavior from propagating density bands to density shock waves. A deeper understanding of the physical mechanisms responsible for these emergent…
Swimming organisms in their natural habitat navigate through a wide array of geometries and chemical environments. Interaction with the boundaries is ubiquitous and can significantly modify the swimming characteristics of the organism as…
We study the effect of a nearby planar wall on the propulsion of a spherical phoretic micro-swimmer driven by reactions on its surface. An asymmetric coverage of catalysts on its surface which absorb reactants and generate products gives…
Recent biological experiments have shown that certain types of cells are able to move in structured and confined environment even without the activation of focal adhesion. Focusing on this particular phenomenon and based on previous works,…
Recent experimental studies have shown that confinement can profoundly affect self-organization in semi-dilute active suspensions, leading to striking features such as the formation of steady and spontaneous vortices in circular domains and…
The dynamics of anisotropic particles in viscous flows underpin a wide range of processes in soft matter, microfluidics, and targeted drug delivery. Here, we investigate the motion of externally driven prolate and oblate spheroids suspended…
Three-dimensional simulations with fully resolved hydrodynamics are performed to study the collective motion of model swimmers in confinement. We show that certain swimming mechanisms can lead to traveling wave-like collective motion even…
Many aquatic microorganisms are able to swim. In natural environments they typically do so in the presence of flows. In recent years it has been shown that the interplay of swimming and flows can give rise to interesting and biologically…
The non-equilibrium structural and dynamical properties of a semiflexible polymer confined in a cylindrical microchannel and exposed to a Poiseuille flow is studied by mesoscale hydrodynamic simulations. For a polymer with a length half of…
The behaviour of an organism often reflects a strategy for coping with its environment. Such behaviour in higher organisms can often be reduced to a few stereotyped modes of movement due to physiological limitations, but finding such modes…
Flagellated bacteria are hydrodynamically attracted to rigid walls, yet past work shows a 'hovering' state where they swim stably at a finite height above surfaces. We use numerics and theory to reveal the physical origin of hovering.…
The relaxation dynamics of glass forming liquids and their structure are influenced in the vicinity of confining walls. In view of the great potential of this effect for applications in those fields of science and industry, where liquids…
We computationally study the kinematics of a simple model reciprocal swimmer (asymmetric dumbbell) as a function of the Reynolds number (Re) and investigate how the onset and gradual increase of inertia impacts the swimming behavior: a…
Swimming microorganisms often self propel in fluids with complex rheology. While past theoretical work indicates that fluid viscoelasticity should hinder their locomotion, recent experiments on waving swimmers suggest a possible…