Related papers: Reaching for the surface: Spheroidal microswimmers…
As a natural and functional behavior, various microorganisms exhibit gravitaxis by orienting and swimming upwards against gravity. Swimming autophoretic nanomotors described herein, comprising bimetallic nanorods, preferentially orient…
The acoustofluidic method holds great promise for manipulating microorganisms. When exposed to the steady vortex structures of acoustic streaming flow, these microorganisms exhibit intriguing dynamic behaviors, such as hydrodynamic trapping…
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…
After colliding with a surface, microswimmers reside there during the detention time. They accumulate and may form complex structures such as biofilms. We introduce a general framework to calculate the distribution of detention times using…
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…
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…
It has long been known that some microswimmers seem to swim counter-intuitively faster when the viscosity of the surrounding fluid is increased, whereas others slow down. This conflicting dependence of the swimming velocity on the viscosity…
Self-propelled microparticles create flow fields that determine how they interact with surfaces, external flows, and each other. These flow fields fall into distinct classes--pushers, pullers, and neutral swimmers--each exhibiting…
Catalytic microswimmers convert the chemical energy of a fuel into motion, sustaining spatial chemical gradients and fluid flows that drive their propulsion. This leads to unconventional individual behavior and the emergence of collective…
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…
Recent experiments and numerical simulations have shown that certain types of microorganisms "reflect" off of a flat surface at a critical angle of departure, independent of the angle of incidence. The nature of the reflection may be active…
Suspensions of unicellular microswimmers such as flagellated bacteria or motile algae exhibit spontaneous density heterogeneities at large enough concentrations. Based on the relative location of the biological actuation appendages i.e.…
We study two microswimmers consisting of a spherical rigid head and a passive elastic tail. In the first one the tail is clamped to the head, and the system oscillates under the action of an external torque. In the second one, head and tail…
Catalytic microswimmers typically swim close to walls due to hydrodynamic and/or phoretic effects. The walls in turn are known to affect their propulsion, making it difficult to single out the contributions that stem from particle-based…
In this article, we consider a swimmer (i.e. a self-deformable body) immersed in a fluid, the flow of which is governed by the stationary Stokes equations. This model is relevant for studying the locomotion of microorganisms or micro robots…
The dynamics of anisotropic particles in viscous flows underpin a wide range of processes in soft matter, microfluidics, and targeted drug delivery. Here, we investigate the motion of externally driven prolate and oblate spheroids suspended…
Biological swimmers frequently navigate in geometrically restricted media. We study the prescribed-stroke problem of swimmers confined to a planar viscous membrane embedded in a bulk fluid of different viscosity. In their motion,…
The dynamics and motion of multi-ciliated microswimmers with a spherical body and a small number N (with 5 < N < 60) of cilia with length comparable to the body radius, is investigated by mesoscale hydrodynamics simulations. A metachronal…
We derive from first principles a three-dimensional theory of self-propelled particle swarming in a viscous fluid environment. Our model predicts emergent collective behavior that depends critically on fluid opacity, mechanism of…
A new mechanism for micro-swimmer motion in an aquatic environment, which implies light-induced polarization perturbations as a motivation for its motion, is proposed. The mechanism assumes that natural light leads to an enhancement of the…