Related papers: Guiding microscale swimmers using teardrop-shaped …
Microswimmers often use chirality to generate translational movement from rotation motion, exhibiting distinct behaviors in complex fluids compared to simple Newtonian fluids. However, the underlying mechanism remains incompletely…
Microorganisms are rarely found in Nature swimming freely in an unbounded fluid. Instead, they typically encounter other organisms, hard walls, or deformable boundaries such as free interfaces or membranes. Hydrodynamic interactions between…
In this work we consider the following question: given a mechanical microswimming mechanism, does increased deformability of the swimmer body hinder or promote the motility of the swimmer? To answer this we study a microswimmer model…
Biological swimmers frequently navigate in geometrically restricted media. We study the prescribed-stroke problem of swimmers confined to a planar viscous membrane embedded in a bulk fluid of different viscosity. In their motion,…
Microswimmers exhibit more diverse behavior in quasi-two dimensions than in three dimensions. Such behavior remains elusive due to the analytical difficulty of dealing with two parallel solid boundaries. The existence of additional…
Natural habitats of most living microorganisms are distinguished by a complex structure often formed by a porous medium such as soil. The dynamics and transport properties of motile microorganisms are strongly affected by crowded and…
In fluid transport across nanopores, there is a fundamental dissipation that arises from the connection between the pore and the macroscopic reservoirs. This entrance effect can hinder the whole transport in certain situations, for short…
Mesoscopic hydrodynamic equations are solved to investigate the dynamics of nanodroplets positioned near a topographic step of the supporting substrate. Our results show that the dynamics depends on the characteristic length scales of the…
The self-propulsion of artificial and biological microswimmers (i.e., active colloidal particles) has often been modelled by using a force and a torque entering into the overdamped equations for the Brownian motion of passive particles.…
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…
Swimming cells often have to self-propel through fluids displaying non-Newtonian rheology. While past theoretical work seems to indicate that stresses arising from complex fluids should systematically hinder low-Reynolds number locomotion,…
Manipulating micro-scale object plays paramount roles in a wide range of fundamental researches and applications. At micro-scale, various methods have been developed in the past decades, including optical, electric, magnetic, aerodynamic…
The interaction between swimming microorganisms or artificial self-propelled colloids and passive (tracer) particles in a fluid leads to enhanced diffusion of the tracers. This enhancement has attracted strong interest, as it could lead to…
We present and interpret simulation results showing how a fluid moves on a hydrophilic substrate patterned by a square array of triangular posts. We demonstrate that the shape of the posts leads to anisotropic spreading, and discuss how…
The ubiquitous aquaporin channels are able to conduct water across cell membranes, combining the seemingly antagonist functions of a very high selectivity with a remarkable permeability. Whereas molecular details are obvious keys to perform…
Self-propelled microparticles create flow fields that determine how they interact with surfaces, external flows, and each other. These flow fields fall into distinct classes--pushers, pullers, and neutral swimmers--each exhibiting…
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…
We use a three-bead-spring model to investigate the dynamics of bi-flagellate micro-swimmers near a surface. While the primary dynamics and scattering are governed by geometric-dependent direct contact, the fluid flows generated by the…
We investigate the dynamics of nanoscale droplets in the vicinity of chemical steps which separate parts of a substrate with different wettabilities. Due to long-ranged dispersion forces, nanodroplets positioned on one side of the step…
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…