Related papers: Autonomous elastic microswimmer
In nature, many unicellular organisms are able to swim with the help of beating filaments, where local energy input leads to cooperative undulatory beating motion. Here, we investigate by employing reinforcement learning how undulatory…
We propose a computational method to solve optimal swimming problems, based on the boundary integral formulation of the hydrodynamic interaction between swimmer and surrounding fluid and direct constrained minimization of the energy…
The self-propulsion of artificial and biological microswimmers (i.e., active colloidal particles) has often been modelled by using a force and a torque entering into the overdamped equations for the Brownian motion of passive particles.…
Animals achieve robust locomotion by offloading regulation from the brain to physical couplings within the body. In contrast, locomotion in artificial systems often depends on centralized processors. We introduce a rapid and autonomous…
A minimal design for a molecular swimmer is proposed that is a based on a mechanochemical propulsion mechanism. Conformational changes are induced by electrostatic actuation when specific parts of the molecule temporarily acquire net…
The swimming of cells, far from any boundary, can arise in the absence of long-range liquid-crystalline order within the cytoplasm, but simple models of this effect are lacking. Here we present a two-dimensional model of droplet…
Metachronal swimming, the sequential beating of limbs with a small phase lag, is observed in many organisms at various scales, but has been studied mostly in the limits of high or low Reynolds numbers. Motivated by the swimming of brine…
Cooperation is vital for the survival of a swarm$^1$. Large scale cooperation allows murmuring starlings to outmaneuver preying falcons$^2$, shoaling sardines to outsmart sea lions$^3$, and homo sapiens to outlive their Pleistocene…
Biological and artificial microswimmers often have to propel through a variety of environments, ranging from heterogeneous suspending media to strong geometrical confinement. Under confinement, local flow fields generated by microswimmers,…
Swimming at the microscale has recently garnered substantial attention due to the fundamental biological significance of swimming microorganisms and the wide range of biomedical applications for artificial microswimmers. These microswimmers…
We propose a minimal model of microswimmer based on immersed boundary methods. We describe a swimmer (either pusher or puller) as a distribution of point forces, representing the swimmer's flagellum and body, with only the latter subjected…
A single flexible filament can be actuated to escape from the scallop theorem and generate net propulsion at low Reynolds number. In this work, we study the dynamics of a simple boundary-driven multi-filament swimmer, a two-arm clamshell…
We discover an instability mechanism in suspensions of self-propelled particles that does not involve active stress. Instead, it is driven by a subtle interplay of inertia, swimmer motility, and concentration fluctuations, through a crucial…
Self-propelled particles with hydrodynamic interactions (microswimmers) have previously been shown to produce long-range ordering phenomena. Many theoretical explanations for these collective phenomena are connected to instabilities in the…
In this article we study synchronization of systems of homogeneous phase-coupled oscillators with plastic coupling strengths and arbitrary underlying topology. The dynamics of the coupling strength between two oscillators is governed by the…
The problem of optimal microscopic swimming in a noisy environment is analyzed. A simplified model in which propulsion is generated by the relative motion of three spheres connected by immaterial links has been considered. We show that an…
Guiding active microswimmers by external fields to requested target locations is a promising strategy to realize complex transport on the microscale. To this end, one possibility consists of attaching the microswimmers to orientable passive…
We show that depending on the values of the coupling constants, two different scenarios for the stationary behavior of a chain of interacting spasers may be realized: (1) all the spasers are synchronized and oscillate with a unique phase…
Micron-size self-propelling particles are often proposed as synthetic models for biological microswimmers, yet they lack internally regulated adaptation, which is central to the autonomy of their biological counterparts. Conversely,…
Active matter exhibits various forms of non-equilibrium states in the absence of external forcing, including macroscopic steady-state currents. Such states are often too complex to be modelled from first principles and our understanding of…