Related papers: Single-Trajectory Characterization of Active Swimm…
The swimming trajectories of self-propelled organisms or synthetic devices in a viscous fluid can be altered by hydrodynamic interactions with nearby boundaries. We explore a multipole description of swimming bodies and provide a general…
Cells swimming in confined environments are attracted by surfaces. We measure the steady-state distribution of smooth-swimming bacteria (Escherichia coli) between two glass plates. In agreement with earlier studies, we find a strong…
We observe thermal motions of ions, and molecules in water through light extinction, at the individual particle level. The motions appear as time dependent intensity variations, characterized through their averaged spectra. Theoretical…
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…
Active particles disturb the fluid around them as force dipoles, or stresslets, which govern their collective dynamics. Unlike swimming speeds, the stresslets of active particles are rarely determined due to the lack of a suitable…
We describe channel flows in a continuum model of deformable nematic particles. In a simple shear flow, deformability leads to a nonlinear coupling of strain rate and vorticity, and results in shape oscillations or flow alignment. The final…
Self-propelled colloids constitute an important class of intrinsically non-equilibrium matter. Typically, such a particle moves ballistically at short times, but eventually changes its orientation, and displays random-walk behavior in the…
We experimentally investigate the effect of particle size on the motion of passive polystyrene spheres in suspensions of Escherichia coli. Using particles covering a range of sizes from 0.6 to 39 microns, we probe particle dynamics at both…
The hydrodynamic interactions of a suspension of self-propelled particles are studied using a direct numerical simulation method which simultaneously solves for the host fluid and the swimming particles. A modified version of the "Smoothed…
We analyze the dynamics of a tracer particle embedded in a bath of hard spheres confined in a channel of varying section. By means of Brownian dynamics simulations we apply a constant force on the tracer particle and discuss the dependence…
The fluctuation-dissipation theorem describes the intimate connection between the Brownian diffusion of thermal particles and their drag coefficients. In the simple case of spherical particles, it takes the form of the Stokes-Einstein…
In fluid dynamics experiments, flake-based flow visualization is a common technique to capture flow structures through the rays reflected from flat tracers suspended in the fluid. However, the correspondence between light intensity patterns…
It is numerically investigated whether a deformable object can propel itself in a superfluid. Articulated bodies and multi-component condensates are examined as swimmers. An articulated two-body swimmer cannot obtain locomotion without…
Swimming droplets are a class of active particles whose motility changes as a function of time due to shrinkage and self-avoidance of their trail. Here we combine experiments and theory to show that our non-Markovian droplet (NMD) model,…
The microalga Chlamydomonas Reinhardtii (CR) is used here as a model system to study the effect of complex environments on the swimming of micro-organisms. Its motion can be modelled by a run and tumble mechanism so that it describes a…
Biological microswimmers, like euglena, deform their body shape to swim through tight confinements having length scales comparable to the microswimmer length scale. Recently, it was shown that self-propelling active droplets can also…
Microscopic active droplets are able to swim autonomously in viscous flows: this puzzling feature stems from solute exchanges with the surrounding fluid via surface reactions or their spontaneous solubilisation, and the interfacial flows…
In parallel with advances in microscale imaging techniques, the fields of biology and materials science have focused on precisely extracting particle properties based on their diffusion behavior. Although the majority of real-world…
We consider the tracer diffusion $D_{rr}$ that arises from the run-and-tumble motion of low Reynolds number swimmers, such as bacteria. Assuming a dilute suspension, where the bacteria move in uncorrelated runs of length $\lambda$, we…
Motivated by the reported peculiar dynamics of a red blood cell in shear flow, we develop an analytical theory for the motion of a nearly--spherical fluid particle enclosed by a visco--elastic incompressible interface in linear flows. The…