Related papers: Modelling of surfactant-driven front instabilities…
The evolutionary success of bacteria lies in their ability to form complex surface-associated communities in diverse biophysical settings. However, it remains poorly understood how compliance of soft surfaces, measured in terms of their…
Models based on surfactant driven instabilities have been employed to describe pattern formation by swarming bacteria. However, by definition, such models cannot account for the effect of bacterial sensing and decision making. Here we…
When surface-active molecules are released at a liquid interface, their spreading dynamics is controlled by Marangoni flows. Though such Marangoni spreading was investigated in different limits, exact solutions remain very few. Here we…
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…
Despite the importance that fluid flow plays in transporting and organizing populations, few laboratory systems exist to systematically investigate the impact of advection on their spatial evolutionary dynamics. To address this problem, we…
The spreading of surfactants on thin films is an industrially and medically important phenomenon, but the dynamics are highly nonlinear and visualization of the surfactant dynamics has been a long-standing experimental challenge. We perform…
Various bacterial strains (e.g. strains belonging to the genera Bacillus, Paenibacillus, Serratia and Salmonella) exhibit colonial branching patterns during growth on poor semi-solid substrates. These patterns reflect the bacterial…
We consider a colony of point-like self-propelled surfactant particles (swimmers) without direct interactions that cover a thin liquid layer on a solid support. Although the particles predominantly swim normal to the free film surface,…
Surfactant distribution heterogeneities at a fluid/fluid interface trigger the Marangoni effect, i.e. a bulk flow due to a surface tension gradient. The influence of surfactant solubility in the bulk on these flows remains incompletely…
We investigate the dynamics of an insoluble surfactant on the surface of a thin viscous fluid spreading inward to fill a surfactant-free region. During the initial stages of surfactant self-healing, Marangoni forces drive an axisymmetric…
Bacterial conglomerates such as biofilms and microcolonies are ubiquitous in nature and play an important role in industry and medicine. In contrast to well-mixed, diluted cultures routinely used in microbial research, bacteria in a…
The surfactant-driven spreading of droplets is an essential process in many applications ranging from coating flow technology to enhanced oil recovery. Despite the significant advancement in describing spreading processes in…
Bacteria are prolific at colonizing diverse surfaces under a widerange of environmental conditions, and exhibit fascinating examples of self-organization across scales. Though it has recently attracted considerable interest, the role of…
Biofilms are ubiquitous macro-colonies of bacteria that develop at various interfaces (solid-liquid, solid-gas or liquid-gas). The formation of biofilms starts with the attachment of individual bacteria to an interface, where they…
Bacterial colonies are abundant on living and nonliving surfaces and are known to mediate a broad range of processes in ecology, medicine, and industry. Although extensively researched, from single cells to demographic scales, a…
Collective behavior of bacterial colonies plays critical roles in adaptability, survivability, biofilm expansion and infection. We employ an individual-based model of an interstitial biofilm to study emergent pattern formation based on the…
Thin liquid films are central to everyday life. They are ubiquitous in modern technology (pharmaceuticals, coatings), consumer products (foams, emulsions) and also serve vital biological functions (tear film of the eye, pulmonary…
The spreading dynamics of surfactant molecules on a thin fluid layer is of both fundamental and practical interest. A mathematical model formulated by Gaver and Grotberg 1990 describing the spreading of a single layer of insoluble…
A number of recent experiments have showed that surfactants can modify the growth mode of an epitaxial film, suppressing islanding and promoting layer-by-layer growth. Here a set of coupled equations are introduced to describe the coupling…
We consider a carpet of self-propelled particles at the liquid-gas interface of a liquid film on a solid substrate. The particles excert an excess pressure on the interface and also move along the interface while the swimming direction…