Related papers: Chemotaxis of artificial microswimmers in active d…
Recent experiments and numerical simulations have shown that certain types of microorganisms "reflect" off of a flat surface at a critical angle of departure, independent of the angle of incidence. The nature of the reflection may be active…
Active systems contain self-propelled particles and can spontaneously self-organize into patterns making them attractive candidates for the self-assembly of smart soft materials. One key limitation of our present understanding of these…
We show that activity and broken fore-aft shape symmetry enable microswimmers to cross streamlines in nonuniform shear, a key yet overlooked factor in active cross-stream migration. Using a model of flagellated microswimmers in microchannel…
Bacteria can chemotactically migrate up attractant gradients by controlling run-and-tumble motility patterns. In addition to this well-known chemotactic behaviour, several soil and marine bacterial species perform chemokinesis: they adjust…
Active particles with their characteristic feature of self-propulsion are regarded as the simplest models for motility in living systems. The accumulation of active particles in low activity regions has led to the general belief that…
Swimming eukaryotic microorganisms such as spermatozoa, algae and ciliates self-propel in viscous fluids using travelling wave-like deformations of slender appendages called flagella. Waves are predominant because Purcell's scallop theorem…
Rheotaxis is a well-known phenomenon among microbial organisms and artificial active colloids, wherein the swimmers respond to an imposed flow. We report the first experimental evidence of upstream rheotaxis by spherical active droplets. It…
Self-propelled particles with hydrodynamic interactions (microswimmers) have previously been shown to produce long-range ordering phenomena. Many theoretical explanations for these collective phenomena are connected to instabilities in the…
Chemotaxis along helical paths towards a target releasing a chemoattractant is found in sperm cells and many microorganisms. We discuss the stochastic differential geometry of the noisy helical swimming path of a chiral swimmer. A chiral…
The microalga Chlamydomonas Reinhardtii (CR) is used here as a model system to study the effect of complex environments on the swimming of micro-organisms. Its motion can be modelled by a run and tumble mechanism so that it describes a…
The current work studies the dynamics of a microswimmer in pressure-driven flow of a weakly viscoelastic fluid. Employing the second-order fluid model, we show that the self-propelling swimmer experiences a viscoelastic swimming lift in…
There are many examples of driven and active matter systems containing particles that exhibit circular motion with different chiralities, such as swimming bacteria near surfaces or certain types of self-driven colloidal particles. Circular…
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 study single cell E.coli chemotaxis in a spatio-temporally varying attractant environment. Modeling the attractant concentration in the form of a traveling sine wave, we measure in our simulations, the chemotactic drift velocity of the…
Selective heating of a microparticle surface had been observed to cause its autonomous movement in a fluid medium due to self-generated temperature gradients. In this work, we theoretically investigate the response of such an…
Biological and artificial microswimmers often self-propel in external flows of vortical nature; relevant examples include algae in small-scale ocean eddies, spermatozoa in uterine peristaltic flows and bacteria in microfluidic devices. A…
We study different types of microswimmers moving in channels with varying cross section and thereby interacting hydrodynamically with the channel walls. Starting from the Smoluchowski equation for a dilute suspension, for which interactions…
We experimentally, numerically and analytically explore the diffusive transport of active colloidal particles with sensory delay, navigating motility landscapes in which the self-propulsion speed depends on space. We show how the transport…
Depending on their mechanism of self-propulsion, active particles can exhibit a time-dependent, often periodic, propulsion velocity. The precise propulsion velocity profile determines their mean square displacement and their effective…
Like ants, some microorganisms are known to leave trails on surfaces to communicate. We explore how trail-mediated self-interaction could affect the behavior of individual microorganisms when diffusive spreading of the trail is negligible…