Related papers: Remote control of self-assembled microswimmers
Achieving macroscopic directed migration of microscale swimmers in a fluid is an important step towards utilizing their autonomous motion. It has been experimentally shown that directed motion can be induced, without any external fields, by…
Achieving stable in vivo locomotion is essential for using magnetically actuated microswimmers for biomedical applications; however, while existing microswimmers have excellent motion control in vitro, their motion is greatly hindered…
Self-assembly is one of the crucial mechanisms allowing to design multifunctional materials. Soft hybrid materials contain components of different nature and exhibit competitive interactions which drive self-organisation into structures of…
We propose a model for a thermally driven microswimmer in which three spheres are connected by two springs with odd elasticity. We demonstrate that the presence of odd elasticity leads to the directional locomotion of the stochastic…
We consider the hydrodynamic theory of an active fluid of self-propelled particles with nematic aligning interactions. This class of materials has polar symmetry at the microscopic level, but forms macrostates of nematic symmetry. We…
We investigate the self-locomotion of an elongated microswimmer by virtue of the unidirectional tangential surface treadmilling. We show that the propulsion could be almost frictionless, as the microswimmer is propelled forward with the…
Micro-organisms propel themselves in viscous environments by the periodic, nonreciprocal beating of slender appendages known as flagella. Active materials have been widely exploited to mimic this form of locomotion. However, the realization…
Recent studies of dynamic self-assembly in ferromagnetic colloids suspended in liquid-air or liquid-liquid interfaces revealed a rich variety of dynamic structures ranging from linear snakes to axisymmetric asters, which exhibit novel…
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…
We show that a two-dimensional system of flocking microswimmers interacting hydrodynamically can be expressed using a Hamiltonian formalism. The Hamiltonian depends strictly on the angles between the particles and their swimming…
Molecular motors are essential to the living, they generate additional fluctuations that boost transport and assist assembly. Self-propelled colloids, that consume energy to move, hold similar potential for the man-made assembly of…
The swimming of cells, far from any boundary, can arise in the absence of long-range liquid-crystalline order within the cytoplasm, but simple models of this effect are lacking. Here we present a two-dimensional model of droplet…
Conventionally, a microscopic particle that performs a reciprocal stroke cannot move through its environment. This is because at small scales, the response of simple Newtonian fluids is purely viscous and flows are time-reversible. We show…
Biased locomotion is a common feature of microorganisms, but little is known about its impact on self-organisation. Inspired by recent experiments showing a transition to large-scale flows, we study theoretically the dynamics of…
The biological fluids encountered by self-propelled cells display complex microstructures and rheology. We consider here the general problem of low-Reynolds number locomotion in a complex fluid. {Building on classical work on the transport…
Swimming at a micrometer scale demands particular strategies. Indeed when inertia is negligible as compared to viscous forces (i.e. Reynolds number $Re$ is lower than unity), hydrodynamics equations are reversible in time. To achieve…
We combine experiments and theory to investigate the orientational dynamics of dipolar ellipsoids, which self-assemble into elongated ribbon-like structures due to the presence in each particle of a permanent magnetic moment perpendicular…
Spontaneous mechanical self-assembly of monodisperse bubbles generally leads to disordered foams at low density: producing crystalline structures such as Kelvin foams has proven to be challenging experimentally, despite them being a minimum…
Many structural properties of conventional passive materials are known to arise from the symmetries of their microscopic constituents. By contrast, it is largely unclear how the interplay between cell shape and self-propulsion controls the…
We outline a concept of self-assembled soft matter devices based on micro-fluidics, which use surfactant bilayer membranes as their main building blocks, arrested in geometric structures provided by top-down lithography. Membranes form…