Related papers: Viscotaxis: microswimmer navigation in viscosity g…
The design of artificial microswimmers is often inspired by the strategies of natural microorganisms. Many of these creatures exploit the fact that elasticity breaks the time-reversal symmetry of motion at low Reynolds numbers, but this…
In this article, we consider a swimmer (i.e. a self-deformable body) immersed in a fluid, the flow of which is governed by the stationary Stokes equations. This model is relevant for studying the locomotion of microorganisms or micro robots…
Most passive droplet transport strategies rely on spatial variations of material properties to drive droplet motion, leading to gradient-based mechanisms with intrinsic length scales that limit the droplet velocity or the transport…
Escherichia coli has long been used as a model organism due to the extensive experimental characterization of its pathways and molecular components. Take chemotaxis as an example, which allows bacteria to sense and swim in response to…
Bacteria in biofilms form complex structures and can collectively migrate within mobile aggregates, which is referred to as swarming. This behavior is influenced by a combination of various factors, including morphological characteristics…
Understanding how microorganisms navigate in complex environments is a central question in active matter and biological physics. Phototaxis - the ability to use light as a navigation cue - is a widespread strategy in motile microalgae to…
Microswimmers typically move near walls, which can strongly influence their motion. However, direct experimental measurements of swimmer-wall separation remain elusive to date. Here, we determine this separation for model catalytic…
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…
In this work, we analyze the motion of an active particle, modeled as a spherical squirmer, in linearly varying viscosity fields. In general, the presence of a particle will disturb a background viscosity field and the disturbance generated…
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…
Microscopic swimmers, e.g., chemotactic bacteria and cells, are capable of directed motion by exerting a force on their environment. For asymmetric microswimmers, e.g., bacteria, spermatozoa and many artificial active colloidal particles, a…
Magnetotactic bacteria (MTB) are fascinating micro-organisms which possess embodied biomineralized nanomagnets providing them the ability to orient with the Earth's magnetic field. This property is presumably related to an evolutionary…
Odd viscosity is a property of chiral active fluids with broken time-reversal and parity symmetries. We show that the flow of such a fluid around a rotating axisymmetric body is exactly solvable and use this solution to determine the…
Synthetic microswimmers mimicking biological movements at the microscale have been developed in recent years. Actuating helical magnetic materials with a homogeneous rotating magnetic field is one of the most widespread techniques for…
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…
We numerically investigate the motion of active artificial microswimmers diffusing in a fuel concentration gradient. We observe that, in the steady state, their probability density accumulates in the low-concentration regions, whereas a…
In this paper we present a hydrodynamic approach to describe the motion of migrating bacteria as a special class of self-propelled systems. Analytical and numerical calculations has been performed to study the behavior of our model in the…
Motile microorganisms, like bacteria and algae, unify abilities like self-propulsion, autonomous navigation, and decision-making on the micron scale. While recent breakthroughs have led to the creation of synthetic microswimmers and…
Bacteria commonly live in structured communities that affect human health and influence ecological systems. Heterogeneous populations, such as motile and non-motile populations, often coexist in bacteria communities. Motile subpopulations…
Locomotion is typically studied either in continuous media where bodies and legs experience forces generated by the flowing medium, or on solid substrates dominated by friction. In the former, centralized coordination is believed to…