Related papers: Active mixtures in a narrow channel: Motility dive…
We demonstrate 'differential dynamic microscopy' (DDM) for the fast, high throughput characterization of the dynamics of active particles. Specifically, we characterize the swimming speed distribution and the fraction of motile cells in…
The role of activity on the hydrodynamic dispersion of bacteria in a model porous medium is studied by tracking thousands of bacteria in a microfluidic chip containing randomly placed pillars. We first evaluate the spreading dynamics of two…
The effects of quenched disorder on a single and many active run-and-tumble particles is studied in one dimension. For a single particle, we consider both the steady-state distribution and the particle's dynamics subject to disorder in…
We model a particulate flow of constant velocity through confined geometries, ranging from a single channel to a bundle of $N_c$ identical coupled channels, under conditions of reversible blockage. Quantities of interest include the exiting…
Microbiology is the science of microbes, particularly bacteria. Many bacteria are motile: they are capable of self-propulsion. Among these, a significant class execute so-called run-and-tumble motion: they follow a fairly straight path for…
Unraveling bacterial strategies for spatial exploration is crucial for understanding the complexity in the organization of life. Bacterial motility determines the spatio-temporal structure of microbial communities, controls infection…
The motivation for this study came from the task of analysing the kinetic behavior of single molecules in a living cell based on Single Molecule Localization Microscopy. Given measurements of both the motion of clusters and molecules, the…
Diverse processes--e.g. bioremediation, biofertilization, and microbial drug delivery--rely on bacterial migration in disordered, three-dimensional (3D) porous media. However, how pore-scale confinement alters bacterial motility is unknown…
Groups of cells, including clusters of cancerous cells, multicellular organisms, and developing organs, may both grow and break apart. What physical factors control these fractures? In these processes, what sets the eventual size of…
Suspensions of swimming bacteria interact hydrodynamically over long ranges, organizing themselves into collective states that drive large-scale chaotic flows, often referred to as "bacterial turbulence". Despite extensive experimental and…
The emergence of clustering and coarsening in crowded ensembles of self-propelled agents is studied using a lattice model in one-dimension. The persistent exclusion process, where particles move at directions that change randomly at a low…
Run-and-tumble is a common but vital strategy that bacteria employ to explore environment suffused with boundaries, as well as to escape from entrapment. In this study we reveal how this strategy and the resulting dynamical behavior can be…
We introduce a simple model of active transport for an ensemble of particles driven by an external shear flow. Active refers to the fact that the flow of the particles is modified by the distribution of particles itself. The model consists…
Systems of self-propelled particles (SPP) interacting by a velocity alignment mechanism in the presence of noise exhibit a rich clustering dynamics. It can be argued that clusters are responsible for the distribution of (local) information…
Crowded environments modify the diffusion of macromolecules, generally slowing their movement and inducing transient anomalous subdiffusion. The presence of obstacles also modifies the kinetics and equilibrium behavior of tracers. While…
For a large class of fluids exhibiting ultrasoft bounded pair potentials, particles form crystals consisting of clusters located in the lattice sites, with a density-independent lattice constant. Here we present an investigation on the…
A simple model of an active colloid consisting of dumbbell-shaped particles that cyclically change their length without propelling themselves is proposed and analyzed. At nanoscales, it represents an idealization for bacterial cytoplasm or…
30% of the DNA in E. coli bacteria is covered by proteins. Such high degree of crowding affect the dynamics of generic biological processes (e.g. gene regulation, DNA repair, protein diffusion etc.) in ways that are not yet fully…
Bacteria living on surfaces use different types of motility mechanisms to move on the surface in search of food or to form micro-colonies. Twitching is one such form of motility employed by bacteria such as N. gonorrhoeae, in which the…
Spontaneous demixing in active matter is a ubiquitous phenomenon that is crucial for numerous living processes ranging from bacterial swarming to sorting of cells in dense tissues. Here, we systematically investigate the effect of spatially…