Related papers: Swarm Hunting and Clusters Turning Inside Out in C…
We discuss recent progress in the theoretical description of chemotaxis by coupling the diffusion equation of a chemical species to equations describing the motion of sensing microorganisms. In particular, we discuss models for…
Conspectus: The ability to navigate in chemical gradients, called chemotaxis, is crucial for the survival of microorganisms. It allows them to find food and to escape from toxins. Many microorganisms can produce the chemicals to which they…
In this paper, we explore experimentally the phase behavior of a dense active suspension of self- propelled colloids. In addition to a solid-like and a gas-like phase observed for high and low densities, a novel cluster phase is reported at…
A common feature of biological self-organization is how active agents communicate with each other or their environment via chemical signaling. Such communications, mediated by self-generated chemical gradients, have consequences for both…
Microorganisms can preferentially orient and move along gradients of a chemo-attractant (i.e., chemotax) while colonies of many microorganisms can collectively undergo complex dynamics in response to chemo-attractants that they themselves…
Collective and directed motility or swarming is an emergent phenomenon displayed by many self-organized assemblies of active biological matter such as clusters of embryonic cells during tissue development, cancerous cells during tumor…
This work focuses on the formation of mating aggregates in zooplankton. In particular, sexual encounters are behaviourally supported by males actively swimming in search for females, and approaching them for mating once they are found.…
In nature, microorganisms must often cope with hostile environmental conditions. To do so they have developed sophisticated cooperative behavior and intricate communication capabilities, such as: direct cell-cell physical interactions via…
We study the collective motion of confined spherical microswimmers such as active colloids which we model by so-called squirmers. To simulate hydrodynamic flow fields including thermal noise, we use the method of multi-particle collision…
Over the past few decades, the research community has been interested in the study of multi-agent systems and their emerging collective dynamics. These systems are all around us in nature, like bacterial colonies, fish schools, bird flocks,…
Micro-organisms aggregate through chemotaxis against a concentration gradient of signals secreted by themselves. We have numerically studied a model consisting of elements with intracellular dynamics, random walks with a state-dependent…
Collective cell migration in response to a chemical cue occurs in many biological processes such as morphogenesis and cancer metastasis. Clusters of migratory cells in these systems are capable of responding to gradients of less than 1%…
The large scale behaviour of a population of cells that grow and interact through the concentration field of the chemicals they secrete is studied using dynamical renormalization group methods. The combination of the effective long-range…
We study the universal behavior of a class of active colloids whose design is inspired by the collective dynamics of natural systems like schools of fish and flocks of birds. These colloids, with off-center repulsive interaction sites,…
Emergent cooperative functionality in active matter systems plays a crucial role in various applications of active swarms, ranging from pollutant foraging and collective threat detection to tissue embolization. In nature, animals like bats…
In nature, bacterial collectives typically consist of multiple species, which are interacting both biochemically and physically. Nonetheless, past studies on the physical properties of swarming bacteria were focused on axenic (single…
When an ensemble of self-propelled camphor boats move in a one-dimensional channel, they exhibit a variety of collective behaviors. Under certain conditions, the boats tend to cluster together and move in a relatively tight formation. This…
Bacterial swarming is a rapid mass-migration, in which thousands of cells spread collectively to colonize a surface. Physically, swarming is a natural example of active particles that use energy to generate motion. Accordingly,…
A striking feature of the collective behavior of spherical microswimmers is that for sufficiently strong self-propulsion they phase-separate into a dense cluster coexisting with a low-density dis- ordered surrounding. Extending our previous…
An interacting pair of chemotactic (anti-chemotactic) active colloids, that can rotate their axes of self-propulsion to align {parallel (anti-parallel)} to a chemical gradient, shows dynamical behaviour that varies from bound states to…