Related papers: Crawling in a fluid
Cells can show not only spontaneous movement but also tactic responses to environmental signals. Since the former can be regarded as the basis to realize the latter, playing essential roles in various cellular functions, it is important to…
Motivated by the swimming of sperm in the non-Newtonian fluids of the female mammalian reproductive tract, we examine the swimming of filaments in the nonlinear viscoelastic Upper Convected Maxwell model. We obtain the swimming velocity and…
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…
We present a simple and generic theoretical description of actin-based motility, where polymerization of filaments maintains propulsion. The dynamics is driven by polymerization kinetics at the filaments' free ends, crosslinking of the…
Dense suspensions of swimming bacteria are known to exhibit collective behaviour arising from the interplay of steric and hydrodynamic interactions. Unconfined suspensions exhibit transient, recurring vortices and jets, whereas those…
We suggest several reciprocal swimming mechanisms that lead to a locomotion only in viscoelastic fluids. The first situation is to have a difference between the two amplitudes of the oscillatory arm motion for a three-sphere microswimmer.…
Many microorganisms take a chiral path while swimming in an ambient uid. In this paper, we study the combined behavior of two chiral swimmers using the well-known squirmer model taking into account chiral asymmetries. In contrast to the…
Self-propelled particles move along circles rather than along a straight line when their driving force does not coincide with their propagation direction. Examples include confined bacteria and spermatozoa, catalytically driven nanorods,…
In pulsating active matter, topological defects are motile despite the absence of any macroscopic flows and microscopic self-propulsion. We reveal that this motility arises from a ratchet effect: the mechanochemical coupling between local…
Swimming in curved spacetimes is a phenomenon whereby free bodies in curved spacetimes are able to propel themselves by performing cyclic internal motions. When originally proposed, it was further suggested that, in the limit of fast…
The initiation of directional cell motion requires symmetry breaking that can happen both with or without external stimuli. During cell crawling, forces generated by the cytoskeleton and their transmission through mechanosensitive adhesions…
We develop a minimal hydrodynamic model, without an orientational order parameter, for assemblies of contractile swimmers encapsulated in a droplet of a binary-fluid emulsion. Our model uses two coupled scalar order parameters, $\phi$ and…
We present here a number of processes, inspired by concepts in Nonlinear Dynamics such as chaotic advection and excitability, that can be useful to understand generic behaviors in chemical or biological systems in fluid flows. Emphasis is…
Self-propelled particles have been experimentally shown to orbit spherical obstacles and move along surfaces. Here, we theoretically and numerically investigate this behavior for a hydrodynamic squirmer interacting with spherical objects…
Fish swim by undulating their bodies. These propulsive motions require coordinated shape changes of a body that interacts with its fluid environment, but the specific shape coordination that leads to robust turning and swimming motions…
A theory is presented for wave-driven propulsion of floating bodies driven into oscillation at the fluid interface. By coupling the equations of motion of the body to a quasi-potential flow model of the fluid, we derive expressions for the…
Microswimming cells and robots exhibit diverse behaviours due to both their swimming and their environment. One of the core environmental features impacting inertialess swimming is background flows. While the influence of select flows,…
Microorganisms often encounter anisotropy, for example in mucus and biofilms. We study how anisotropy and elasticity of the ambient fluid affects the speed of a swimming microorganism with a prescribed stroke. Motivated by recent…
The swimming behavior of bacteria and other microorganisms is sensitive to the physical properties of the fluid in which they swim. Mucus, biofilms, and artificial liquid-crystalline solutions are all examples of fluids with some degree of…
An artificial microswimmer drifts in response to spatio-temporal modulations of an activating suspension medium. We consider two competing mechanisms capable of influencing its tactic response: angular fluctuations, which help it explore…