Related papers: Viscotaxis: microswimmer navigation in viscosity g…
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…
It has been shown that an anisotropic liquid crystalline (LC) environment can be used to guide the self-propulsion dynamics of dispersed microswimmers, such as bacteria. This type of composite system is named "living nematic" (LN). In the…
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…
The self-propelled motion of microscopic bodies immersed in a fluid medium is studied using molecular dynamics simulation. The advantage of the atomistic approach is that the detailed level of description allows complete freedom in…
One of the principal mechanisms by which surfaces and interfaces affect microbial life is by perturbing the hydrodynamic flows generated by swimming. By summing a recursive series of image systems we derive a numerically tractable…
Active microswimmers are known to affect the macroscopic viscosity of suspensions in a more complex manner than passive particles. For puller-like microswimmers an increase in the viscosity has been observed. It has been suggested that the…
Geometric confinements are frequently encountered in the biological world and strongly affect the stability, topology, and transport properties of active suspensions in viscous flow. Based on a far-field analytical model, the…
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…
We show that a two-dimensional system of flocking microswimmers interacting hydrodynamically can be expressed using a Hamiltonian formalism. The Hamiltonian depends strictly on the angles between the particles and their swimming…
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…
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…
We theoretically and computationally study the low-Reynolds-number hydrodynamics of a linear active microswimmer surfing on a compressible thin fluid layer characterized by an odd viscosity. Since the underlying three-dimensional fluid is…
Viscosity is a key property of cell membranes that controls mobility of embedded proteins and membrane remodeling. Measuring it is challenging because existing approaches involve complex experimental designs and/or models, and the…
In this paper we study swimming of a model organism, the so-called Taylor's swimming sheet, in a viscoelastic fluid close to a solid boundary. This situation comprises natural habitats of many swimming microorganisms, and while previous…
Some micro-algae are sensitive to light intensity gradients. This property is known as phototaxis: the algae swim toward a light source (positive phototaxis). We use this property to control the motion of micro-algae within a Poiseuille…
Soft surfaces, spanning vastly different environmental and biomedical settings, are frequently colonised by surface-associated bacteria. Yet, how soft surfaces govern bacterial dynamics and their self-organisation into colonies remains…
The dynamics of swimming bacteria depend on the properties of their habitat media. Recently it was shown that the motion of swimming bacteria dispersed directly in a non-toxic water-based lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal can be controlled…
Many swimming microorganisms, such as bacteria and sperm, use flexible flagella to move through viscoelastic media in their natural environments. In this paper we address the effects a viscoelastic fluid has on the motion and beating…
The motility of microorganisms is influenced greatly by their hydrodynamic interactions with the fluidic environment they inhabit. We show by direct experimental observation of the bi-flagellated alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii that fluid…
Biological systems like ciliated microorganisms are capable to respond to the external chemical gradients, a process known as chemotaxis which has been studied here using the chiral squirmer model. This theoretical model considers the…