Related papers: Cooperation in a fluid swarm of fuel-free micro-sw…
Living systems continuously sense, integrate, and act on chemical information using multiscale biochemical networks whose dynamics are inherently nonlinear, adaptive, and energy-efficient. Yet, most attempts to harness such "wetware" for…
One of the major motifs in collective or swarm intelligence is that, even though individuals follow simple rules, the resulting global behavior can be complex and intelligent. In artificial swarm systems, such as swarm robots, the goal is…
Microorganisms often encounter strong confinement and complex hydrodynamic flows while navigating their habitats. Combining finite-element methods and stochastic simulations, we study the interplay of active transport and heterogeneous…
Turbulence is ubiquitous, from oceanic currents to small-scale biological and quantum systems. Self-sustained turbulent motion in microbial suspensions presents an intriguing example of collective dynamical behavior amongst the simplest…
We study the activity of "living" droplets, which confine 1-6 mesoswimmers in 3D using a superhydrophobic substrate. The swimmers induce oscillations of the droplets at their inherent resonant frequencies, regardless of swimmer size and…
Chiral active particles, or self-propelled circle swimmers, from sperm cells to asymmetric Janus colloids, form a rich set of patterns, which are different from those seen in linear swimmers. Such patterns have mainly been explored for…
Bacterial flagellar swarming enables dense microbial populations to migrate collectively across surfaces, often resulting in emergent, coordinated behaviors. However, probing the underlying energetics of swarming at the single cluster level…
In the present paper the behavior of a single artificial microswimmer is addressed, namely an active droplet moving by Marangoni flow. The non-uniform surface tension distribution underlying the propulsion mechanism of the droplet, is…
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…
Hydrodynamic interactions driven by particle activity are ubiquitous in active colloidal systems. Although these interactions are strongly influenced by the interfacial actuation mechanism and geometry of the swimming particles, theoretical…
Large ensembles of interacting, out-of-equilibrium agents are a paradigm of active matter. Their constituents' intrinsic activity may entail the spontaneous separation into localized phases of high and low densities. Motile microbes,…
Biomolecular condensates are essential for cellular organization and result from phase separation in systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Among various models, chemically active droplets play a significant role, consisting of…
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…
Sperm cooperation has evolved in a variety of taxa and is often considered a response to sperm competition, yet the benefit of this form of collective movement remains unclear. Here we use fine-scale imaging and a minimal mathematical model…
The underlying mechanisms and physics of catalytic Janus microswimmers is highly complex, requiring details of the associated phoretic fields and the physiochemical properties of catalyst, particle, boundaries, and the fuel used. Therefore,…
Bacterial conglomerates such as biofilms and microcolonies are ubiquitous in nature and play an important role in industry and medicine. In contrast to well-mixed, diluted cultures routinely used in microbial research, bacteria in a…
Geometric confinement plays an important role in the dynamics of natural and synthetic microswimmers from bacterial cells to self-propelled particles in high-throughput microfluidic devices. However, little is known about the effects of…
Living organisms are molecular systems with self-sustained dynamics via energy conversion through molecular cooperation, resulting in highly complex macroscopic behaviors. Construction of such autonomous macroscopic dynamics at a molecular…
We present a detailed numerical study of a microscopic artificial swimmer realized recently by Dreyfus et al. in experiments [R. Dreyfus et al., Nature 437, 862 (2005)]. It consists of an elastic filament composed of superparamagnetic…
Experiments have recently shown the feasibility of utilising bacteria as micro-scale robotic devices, with special attention paid to the development of bacteria-driven micro-swimmers taking advantage of built-in actuation and sensing…