Related papers: Self-Healing Small-Scale Swimmers

When swimming at low Reynolds numbers, inertial effects are negligible and reciprocal movements cannot induce net motion. Instead, symmetry breaking is necessary to achieve net propulsion. Directed swimming can be supported by magnetic…

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…

Synthetic microswimmers mimicking biological movements at the microscale have been developed in recent years. Actuating helical magnetic materials with a homogeneous rotating magnetic field is one of the most widespread techniques for…

Flexible electronic systems such as roll up displays, wearable devices etc. promise exciting possibilities that could change the way humans interact with the environment. However, they suffer from poor reliability of interconnects and…

A recent promising technique for robotic micro-swimmers is to endow them with a magnetization and apply an external magnetic field to provoke their deformation. In this note we consider a simple planar micro-swimmer model made of two…

Swimming micro-organisms such as flagellated bacteria and sperm cells have fascinating locomotion capabilities. Inspired by their natural motion, there is an ongoing effort to develop artificial robotic nano-swimmers for potential in-body…

Synthetic microswimmers show great promise in biomedical applications such as drug delivery and microsurgery. Their locomotion, however, is subject to stringent constraints due to the dominance of viscous over inertial forces at low…

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…

Physics governing the locomotion of microorganisms and other microsystems is dominated by viscous damping. An effective swimming strategy involves the non-reciprocal and periodic deformations of the considered body. Here, we show that a…

We study the motion of a microscopic swimmer composed of a semiflexible polymer anchored at the surface of a magnetic sphere using hydrodynamic simulations and scaling arguments. The swimmer is driven by a rotating magnetic field, and…

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,…

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 formulate and solve the equations governing the dynamics of a microscopic artificial swimmer composed of a head and of a tail made of a thin film of permanent magnetic material. This is a variant of the model swimmer proposed by Dreyfus…

In the study of microscopic flows, self-propulsion has been particularly topical in recent years, with the rise of miniature artificial swimmers as a new tool for flow control, low Reynolds number mixing, micromanipulation or even drug…

Microscopic self-propelled swimmers capable of autonomous navigation through complex environments provide appealing opportunities for localization, pick-up and delivery of micro-and nanoscopic objects. Inspired by motile cells and bacteria,…

The ability to propel against flows, i.e., to perform positive rheotaxis, can provide exciting opportunities for applications in targeted therapeutics and non-invasive surgery. To date, no biocompatible technologies exist for navigating…

The motion of an artificial micro-scale swimmer that uses a chemical reaction catalyzed on its own surface to achieve autonomous propulsion is fully characterized experimentally. It is shown that at short times, it has a substantial…

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…

All biological organisms, from plants to living creatures, can heal minor wounds and damage. The realization of a similar self-healing capacity in inorganic materials has been a design target for many decades. This would represent a…

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…