Related papers: Long-time anomalous swimmer diffusion in smectic l…
In equilibrium liquid crystals, chirality leads to a variety of spectacular three-dimensional structures, but chiral and achiral phases with the same broken continuous symmetries have identical long-time, large-scale dynamics. In this…
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…
We investigate theoretically the collective dynamics of soft active particles living in a viscous fluid. We focus on a minimal model for active but non-motile particles consisting of $N>1$ elastic dimers deformed by active stresses and…
Swimming cells and microorganisms must often move though complex fluids that contain an immersed microstructure such as polymer molecules, or filaments. In many important biological processes, such as mammalian reproduction and bacterial…
Time correlation functions in the Lebwohl-Lasher model of nematic liquid crystals are studied using theory and molecular dynamics simulations. In particular, the autocorrelation functions of angular momentum and nematic director…
We study the kinetics of the nematic-isotropic transition in a two-dimensional liquid crystal by using a lattice Boltzmann scheme that couples the tensor order parameter and the flow consistently. Unlike in previous studies, we find the…
The acoustofluidic method holds great promise for manipulating microorganisms. When exposed to the steady vortex structures of acoustic streaming flow, these microorganisms exhibit intriguing dynamic behaviors, such as hydrodynamic trapping…
Semiflexible polymers in concentrated lyotropic solution are studied within a bead-spring model by molecular dynamics simulations, focusing on the emergence of a smectic A phase and its properties. We systematically vary the density of the…
Biological microswimmers often encounter deformable boundaries in physiological conditions; for instance, the viscoelastic walls of reproductive tract during migration of spermatozoa, or host tissue during early bacterial biofilm formation.…
The mean-squared displacement (MSD) of a hard sphere and of a dumbbell molecule consisting of two fused hard spheres immersed in a dense hard-sphere system is calculated within the mode-coupling theory for ideal liquid-glass transitions. It…
We report on a switchable emulsion droplet microswimmer by utilizing a temperature-dependent transition of the droplet phase. The droplets, made from a liquid crystalline (LC) smectic phase material ($T =$ 25 $^{\circ}$C), self-propel only…
Many aquatic microorganisms are able to swim. In natural environments they typically do so in the presence of flows. In recent years it has been shown that the interplay of swimming and flows can give rise to interesting and biologically…
Autonomous locomotion is a ubiquitous phenomenon in biology and in physics of active systems at microscopic scale. This includes prokaryotic, eukaryotic cells (crawling and swimming) and artificial swimmers. An outstanding feature is the…
The stochastic dynamics of colloidal particles with surface activity--in the form of catalytic reaction or particle release--and self-phoretic effects is studied analytically. Three different time scales corresponding to inertial effects,…
We study how hydrodynamic interactions affect the collective behaviour of active particles suspended in a fluid at high concentrations, with particular attention to lubrication forces which appear when the particles are very close to one…
A system of ferromagnetic particles trapped at a liquid-liquid interface and subjected to a set of magnetic fields (magnetocapillary swimmers) is studied numerically using a hybrid method combining the pseudopotential lattice Boltzmann…
We study the coarsening dynamics of two and three dimensional biaxial nematic liquid crystals, using Langevin dynamics. Unlike previous work, we use a model with no a priori relationship among the three elastic constants associated with…
A droplet bouncing on the surface of a vertically vibrating liquid bath can walk horizontally, guided by the waves it generates on each impact. This results in a self-propelled classical particle-wave entity. By using a one-dimensional…
We investigate how shear influences the dynamics of active particles in dilute to concentrated suspensions. Using apolar active suspensions of squirmers as model systems, we show how their long-time diffusive dynamics can surprisingly slow…
Electro-hydrodynamic phenomena in liquid crystals constitute an old but still very active research area. The reason is that these phenomena play the key role in various applications of liquid crystals and due to the general interest of…