Related papers: Microscale locomotion in a nematic liquid crystal
Geometric confinements are frequently encountered in soft matter systems and in particular significantly alter the dynamics of swimming microorganisms in viscous media. Surface-related effects on the motility of microswimmers can lead to…
Flagellated microswimmers B. Subtilis dispersed in a nematic phase of a lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal form a living liquid crystal (LLC). The combination of the passive and active components allows us to analyze how the active…
Motivated by the swimming of sperm in the non-Newtonian fluids of the female mammalian reproductive tract, we examine the swimming of filaments in the nonlinear viscoelastic Upper Convected Maxwell model. We obtain the swimming velocity and…
From the mitotic spindle up to tissues and biofilms, many biological systems behave as active droplets, which often break symmetry and change shape spontaneously. Here, I show that active nematic droplets can experience a fingering…
We study colloidal particles in a nematic-liquid-crystal-filled microfluidic channel and show how elastic interactions between the particle and the channel wall lead to different particle dynamics compared with conventional microfluidics.…
Small-scale locomotion plays an important role in biology. Different modelling approaches have been proposed in the past. The simplest model is an infinite inextensible two-dimensional waving sheet, {originally introduced by Taylor}, which…
The locomotion and design of microswimmers are topical issues of current fundamental and applied research. In addition to numerous living and artificial active microswimmers, a passive microswimmer was identified only recently: a soft,…
Continuum models of active nematic gels have proved successful to describe a number of biological systems consisting of a population of rodlike motile subunits in a fluid environment. However, in order to get a thorough understanding of the…
The effects of fluid elasticity on the swimming behavior of the nematode \emph{Caenorhabditis elegans} are experimentally investigated by tracking the nematode's motion and measuring the corresponding velocity fields. We find that fluid…
Microscale propulsion is integral to numerous biomedical systems, for example biofilm formation and human reproduction, where the surrounding fluids comprise suspensions of polymers. These polymers endow the fluid with non-Newtonian…
Various microorganisms and some mammalian cells are able to swim in viscous fluids by performing nonreciprocal body deformations, such as rotating attached flagella or by distorting their entire body. In order to perform chemotaxis, i.e. to…
We present a unified discussion of three types of near-spherical amoeboid microswimmers, driven by periodic, axially symmetric, achiral deformations (swim strokes): a solid deformable body, a vesicle with incompressible fluid membrane, and…
Active processes drive and guide biological dynamics across scales -- from subcellular cytoskeletal remodelling, through tissue development in embryogenesis, to population-level bacterial colonies expansion. In each of these, biological…
The effect of crowding on the run-and-tumble dynamics of swimmers such as bacteria is studied using a discrete lattice model of mutually excluding particles that move with constant velocity along a direction that is randomized at a rate…
In this paper, we give formulas for the swimming of simplified two-dimensional bodies in complex fluids using the reciprocal theorem. By way of these formulas we calculate the swimming velocity due to small-amplitude deformations on the…
Low Reynolds number swimmers frequently move near boundaries, such as spirochetes moving through porous tissues and sperm navigating the reproductive tract. Furthermore, these microorganisms must often navigate non-Newtonian fluids such as…
The swimming of a deformable planar slab in a viscous incompressible fluid is studied on the basis of the Navier-Stokes equations. A continuum of plane wave displacements, symmetric on both sides of the slab and characterized by a…
The effects of fluid viscosity on the kinematics of a small swimmer at low Reynolds number are investigated in both experiments and in a simple model. The swimmer is the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, which is an undulating roundworm…
A nonlinear viscoelastic theory of nematodynamic type is developed for nematic liquid crystalline (LC) semi-flexible polymers. A measure of transient elastic strain due to the change in length of macromolecular strands under stress, and the…
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…