Related papers: Pseudo-Chemotactic Drifts of Artificial Microswimm…
An artificial microswimmer drifts in response to spatio-temporal modulations of an activating suspension medium. We consider two competing mechanisms capable of influencing its tactic response: angular fluctuations, which help it explore…
Living microorganisms are capable of a tactic response to external stimuli by swimming towards or away from the stimulus source; they do so by adapting their tactic signal transduction pathways to the environment. Their self-motility thus…
The motion of an artificial micro-scale swimmer that uses a chemical reaction catalyzed on its own surface to achieve autonomous propulsion is fully characterized experimentally. It is shown that at short times, it has a substantial…
Contrary to microbial taxis, where a tactic response to external stimuli is controlled by complex chemical pathways acting like sensor-actuator loops, taxis of artificial microswimmers is a purely stochastic effect associated with a…
Microorganisms can preferentially orient and move along gradients of a chemo-attractant (i.e., chemotax) while colonies of many microorganisms can collectively undergo complex dynamics in response to chemo-attractants that they themselves…
We study the detention statistics of self-propelling droplet microswimmers attaching to microfluidic pillars. These droplets show negative autochemotaxis: they shed a persistent repulsive trail of spent fuel that biases them to detach from…
Chemotaxis and auto-chemotaxis play an important role in many essential biological processes. We present a self-propelling artificial swimmer system which exhibits chemotaxis as well as negative auto-chemotaxis. Oil droplets in an aqueous…
Biological and synthetic microswimmers display a wide range of swimming trajectories depending on driving forces and torques. In this paper we consider a simple overdamped model of self-propelled particles with a constant self-propulsion…
Phoretic swimmers are a class of artificial active particles that has received significant attention in recent years. By making use of self-generated gradients (e.g. in temperature, electric potential or some chemical product) phoretic…
Microswimmers in nature often experience spatial gradients of viscosity. In this work we develop theoretical results for the dynamics of active particles, biological or otherwise, swimming through viscosity gradients. We model the active…
In micro-swimmer suspensions locomotion necessarily generates fluid motion, and it is known that such flows can lead to collective behavior from unbiased swimming. We examine the complementary problem of how chemotaxis is affected by…
Many fascinating properties of biological active matter crucially depend on the capacity of constituting entities to perform directed motion, e.g., molecular motors transporting vesicles inside cells or bacteria searching for food. While…
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…
Active (i.e., self-propelled or swimming) particles moving through an isotropic fluid exhibit conventional diffusive behavior. We report anomalous diffusion of an active particle moving in an anisotropic, nematic background. Whilst the…
Chemotaxis of the bacterium Escherichia coli is well understood in shallow chemical gradients, but its swimming behavior remains difficult to interpret in steep gradients. By focusing on single-cell trajectories from simulations, we…
We discuss recent progress in the theoretical description of chemotaxis by coupling the diffusion equation of a chemical species to equations describing the motion of sensing microorganisms. In particular, we discuss models for…
Organisms often swim through density stratified fluids. In this Letter, we investigate the dynamics of small active particles swimming in density gradients and report theoretical evidence of taxis as a result of density stratification…
Ciliated microswimmers and flagellated bacteria alter their swimming trajectories to follow the direction of an applied electric field exhibiting electrotaxis. Both for matters of application and physical modelling, it is instructive to…
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…
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.…