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Micro-scale swimming robots have been envisaged for many medical applications such as targeted drug delivery, where the microrobot will be expected to navigate in a fluid through channels carrying a payload. Alternatively, in many cases,…

This paper studies the influence of orienting external fields on pattern formation, particularly mesoscale turbulence, in microswimmer suspensions. To this end, we apply a hydrodynamic theory that can be derived from a microscopic…

Artificial microswimmers are a new technology with promising microfluidics and biomedical applications, such as directed cargo transport, microscale assembly, and targeted drug delivery. A fundamental barrier to realising this potential is…

Living creatures exhibit a remarkable diversity of locomotion mechanisms, evolving structures specialised for interacting with their environment. In the vast majority of cases, locomotor behaviours such as flying, crawling, and running, are…

Physics governing the locomotion of microorganisms and other microsystems is dominated by viscous damping. An effective swimming strategy involves the non-reciprocal and periodic deformations of the considered body. Here, we show that a…

A growing body of work aims at designing and testing micron-scale synthetic swimmers. One method, inspired by the locomotion of flagellated bacteria, consists of applying a rotating magnetic field to a rigid, helically-shaped, propeller…

A key goal in developing molecular microrobots that mimic real-world animal dynamic behavior is to understand better the self-continuous progressive motion resulting from collective molecular transformation. This study reports, for the…

Sperm are propelled by bending waves travelling along the flagellum. During steering in gradients of sensory cues, sperm adjust the flagellar beat waveform. Symmetric and asymmetric beat waveforms produce straight and curved swimming paths,…

The field of active matter in general and microswimming in particular has experienced a rapid and ongoing expansion over the last decade. A particular interesting aspect is provided by artificial autonomous microswimmers constructed from…

Active matter exhibits various forms of non-equilibrium states in the absence of external forcing, including macroscopic steady-state currents. Such states are often too complex to be modelled from first principles and our understanding of…

This work aims at finding optimal navigation policies for thin, deformable microswimmers that progress in a viscous fluid by propagating a sinusoidal undulation along their slender body. These active filaments are embedded in a prescribed,…

The dynamics of fluid vesicles is studied under flow in microchannels, in which the width varies periodically along the channel. Three types of flow instabilities of prolate vesicles are found. For small quasi-spherical vesicles -- compared…

Microswimmers, especially in theoretical treatments, are generally taken to be completely inertia-free, since inertial effects on their motion are typically small and assuming their absence simplifies the problem considerably. Yet in nature…

In this paper we study a mathematical model of one-dimensional swimmers performing a planar motion while fully immersed in a viscous fluid. The swimmers are assumed to be of small size, and all inertial effects are neglected. Hydrodynamic…

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 experimentally and theoretically study the dynamics of a low-Reynolds number helical swimmer moving across viscosity gradients. Experimentally, a double-layer viscosity is generated by superposing two miscible fluids with similar…

Fishes, cetaceans, and many other aquatic vertebrates undulate their bodies to propel themselves through water. Swimming requires an intricate interplay between sensing the environment, making decisions, controlling internal dynamics, and…

A model of an autonomous three-sphere microswimmer is proposed by implementing a coupling effect between the two natural lengths of an elastic microswimmer. Such a coupling mechanism is motivated by the previous models for synchronization…

Few simulations exist for microswimmers near deformable interfaces. Here, we present numerical simulations of the hydrodynamic flows associated with a single microswimmer embedded in a binary fluid mixture. The two fluids demix, separated…

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…