Related papers: Engineering passive swimmers by shaking liquids
Microscopic artificial swimmers have recently become highly attractive due to their promising potential for biomedical applications. The pioneering work of Dreyfus et al (2005) has demonstrated the motion of a microswimmer with an…
Actuating periodically an elastic filament in a viscous liquid generally breaks the constraints of Purcell's scallop theorem, resulting in the generation of a net propulsive force. This observation suggests a method to design simple…
In this article, we are interested in studying locomotion strategies for a class of shape-changing bodies swimming in a fluid. This class consists of swimmers subject to a particular linear dynamics, which includes the two most investigated…
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…
In this paper, we derive analytical expressions for the leading-order hydrodynamic mobility of a small solid particle undergoing motion tangential to a nearby large spherical capsule whose membrane possesses resistance towards shearing 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…
Swimming at low Reynolds number in Newtonian fluids is only possible through non-reciprocal body deformations due to the kinematic reversibility of the Stokes equations. We consider here a model swimmer consisting of two linked spheres,…
Active systems contain self-propelled particles and can spontaneously self-organize into patterns making them attractive candidates for the self-assembly of smart soft materials. One key limitation of our present understanding of these…
We present a detailed numerical study of a microscopic artificial swimmer realized recently by Dreyfus et al. in experiments [R. Dreyfus et al., Nature 437, 862 (2005)]. It consists of an elastic filament composed of superparamagnetic…
We demonstrate with experiments and simulations how microscopic self-propelled particles navigate through environments presenting complex spatial features, which mimic the conditions inside cells, living organisms and future lab-on-a-chip…
Many microorganisms swim by performing larger non-reciprocal shape deformations that are initiated locally by molecular motors. However, it remains unclear how decentralized shape control determines the movement of the entire organism.…
Advancements in artificial active matter heavily rely on our ability to characterise their motion. Yet, the most widely used tool to analyse the latter is standard wide-field microscopy, which is largely limited to the study of…
A remarkable variety of organisms use metachronal coordination (i.e., numerous neighboring appendages beating sequentially with a fixed phase lag) to swim or pump fluid. This coordination strategy is used by microorganisms to break symmetry…
Active particles (living or synthetic) often move through inhomogeneous environments, such as gradients in light, heat or nutrient concentration, that can lead to directed motion (or taxis). Recent research has explored inhomogeneity in the…
Undulatory locomotion is a means of self-propulsion that relies on the generation and propagation of waves along a body. As a mode of locomotion it is primitive and relatively simple, yet can be remarkably robust. No wonder then, that it is…
Microswimmers are sub-millimeter swimming microrobots that show potential as a platform for controllable locomotion in applications including targeted cargo delivery and minimally invasive surgery. To be viable for these target…
It is often desirable to enhance the motility of active nano- or microscale swimmers such as, e.g., self-propelled Janus particles as agents of chemical reactions or weak sperm cells for better chances of successful fertilization. Here we…
Microswimmers often exhibit surprising patterns due to the nonequilibrium nature of their dynamics. Collectively, suspensions of microswimmers appear as a liquid whose properties set it apart from its passive counterpart. To understand the…
Self-propelled nanoparticles moving through liquids offer the possibility of creating advanced applications where such nanoswimmers can operate as artificial molecular-sized motors. Achieving control over the motion of nanoswimmers is a…
The biological fluids encountered by self-propelled cells display complex microstructures and rheology. We consider here the general problem of low-Reynolds number locomotion in a complex fluid. {Building on classical work on the transport…