Related papers: Can Magnetic Multilayers Propel Artificial Microsw…
Various microswimmers move along circles rather than straight lines due to their swimming mechanisms, body shapes or hydrodynamic effects. Here, we adopt the concepts of stochastic thermodynamics to analyze circle swimmers confined in a…
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,…
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…
The swimming direction of biological or artificial microscale swimmers tends to be randomised over long time-scales by thermal fluctuations. Bacteria use various strategies to bias swimming behaviour and achieve directed motion against a…
Swimming is ubiquitous in nature and crucial for the survival of a wide range of organisms. The physics of swimming at the viscosity-dominated microscale and inertia-dominated macroscale is well studied. However, in between lies a…
Synthetic microswimmers show great promise in biomedical applications such as drug delivery and microsurgery. Their locomotion, however, is subject to stringent constraints due to the dominance of viscous over inertial forces at low…
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…
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…
An optimal microswimmer with a given geometry has a surface velocity profile that minimizes energy dissipation for a given swimming speed. An axisymmetric swimmer can be puller-, pusher-, or neutral-type depending on the sign of the…
The propulsion of many eukaryotic cells is generated by flagella, flexible slender filaments that are actively oscillating in space and time. The dynamics of these biological appendages have inspired the design of many types of artificial…
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…
Fission and fusion processes of particles clusters occur in many areas of physics and chemistry from subnuclear to astronomic length scales. Here we study fission and fusion of magnetic microswimmer clusters as governed by their…
The connection between swimming and control theory is attracting increasing attention in the recent literature. Starting from an idea of Alberto Bressan [7] we study the system of a planar body whose position and shape are described by a…
We conduct experiments with flexible swimmers to address the impact of fluid viscoelasticity on their locomotion. The swimmers are composed of a magnetic head actuated in rotation by a frequency-controlled magnetic field and a flexible tail…
The underlying mechanisms and physics of catalytic Janus microswimmers is highly complex, requiring details of the associated phoretic fields and the physiochemical properties of catalyst, particle, boundaries, and the fuel used. Therefore,…
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…
Biomedical applications such as targeted drug delivery, microsurgery, and sensing rely on reaching precise areas within the body in a minimally invasive way. Artificial bacterial flagella (ABFs) have emerged as potential tools for this task…
In the study of microscopic flows, self-propulsion has been particularly topical in recent years, with the rise of miniature artificial swimmers as a new tool for flow control, low Reynolds number mixing, micromanipulation or even drug…
Microswimmers (planktonic microorganisms or artificial active particles) immersed in a fluid interact with the ambient flow, altering their trajectories. In surface gravity waves, a common goal for microswimmers is vertical migration (e.g.,…
Over a sufficiently long period of time, or from an appropriate distance, the motion of many swimmers can appear smooth, with their trajectories appearing almost ballistic in nature and slowly varying in character. These long-time…