Related papers: Dynamics of a microswimmer-microplatelet composite
Hydrodynamic interactions are crucial for determining the cooperative behavior of microswimmers at low Reynolds numbers. Here we provide a comprehensive analysis of the scaling and strength of the interactions in the case of a pair of…
Artificial microswimmers are a new technology with promising microfluidics and biomedical applications, such as directed cargo transport, microscale assembly, and targeted drug delivery. A fundamental barrier to realising this potential is…
Micro-swimmer locomotion in heterogeneous media is increasingly relevant in biological physics due to the prevalence of microorganisms in complex environments. A model for such porous media is the Brinkman fluid which accounts for a sparse…
We illustrate a concept for shape-changing microswimmers, which exploits the hysteresis of a shape transition of an elastic object, by an elastic disk undergoing cyclic localized swelling. Driving the control parameter of a hysteretic shape…
We study the three-dimensional dynamics of a spherical microswimmer in cylindrical Poiseuille flow which can be mapped onto a Hamiltonian system. Swinging and tumbling trajectories are identified. In 2D they are equivalent to oscillating…
Microswimmers typically operate in complex environments. In biological systems, often diverse species are simultaneously present and interact with each other. Here, we derive a (time-dependent) particle-scale statistical description, namely…
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…
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…
Micro-nano-robotic swimmers have promising potential for future biomedical tasks such as targeted drug delivery and minimally-invasive diagnosis. An efficient method for controlled actuation of such nano-swimmers is applying a rotating…
Self-propelled micron-size particles suspended in a fluid, like bacteria or synthetic microswimmers, are strongly non-equilibrium systems where particle motility breaks the microscopic detailed balance, often resulting in large-scale…
The realization of artificial microscopic swimmers able to propel in viscous fluids is an emergent research field of fundamental interest and vast technological applications. For certain functionalities, the efficiency of the microswimmer…
We address the problem of controlling a dynamical system governing the motion of a 3D weighted shape changing body swimming in a perfect fluid. The rigid displacement of the swimmer results from the exchange of momentum between prescribed…
The design of artificial microswimmers is often inspired by the strategies of natural microorganisms. Many of these creatures exploit the fact that elasticity breaks the time-reversal symmetry of motion at low Reynolds numbers, but this…
This paper studies the influence of orienting external fields on pattern formation, particularly mesoscale turbulence, in microswimmer suspensions. To this end, we apply a hydrodynamic theory that can be derived from a microscopic…
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…
We study the properties of arbitrary micro-swimmers towing a passive load through a viscous liquid. The simple close-form expression for the dragging efficiency of a general micro-swimmer dragging a distant load is found, and the leading…
Systems of motile microorganisms exhibit a multitude of collective phenomena, including motility-induced phase separation and turbulence. Sensing of the environment and adaptation of movement plays an essential role in the emergent…
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…
Transport of material across liquid interfaces is ubiquitous for living cells and is also a crucial step in drug delivery and in many industrial processes. The fluids that are present on either side of the interfaces will usually have…
The majority of studies on self-propelled particles and microswimmers concentrates on objects that do not feature a deterministic bending of their trajectory. However, perfect axial symmetry is hardly found in reality, and shape-asymmetric…