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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…
Bacteria can exploit mechanics to display remarkable plasticity in response to locally changing physical and chemical conditions. Compliant structures play a striking role in their taxis behavior, specifically for navigation inside complex…
Active systems comprising micron-sized self-propelling units, also termed microswimmers, are promising candidates for the bottom-up assembly of small structures and reconfigurable materials. Here we leverage field-driven colloidal assembly…
Biological and artificial microswimmers often have to propel through a variety of environments, ranging from heterogeneous suspending media to strong geometrical confinement. Under confinement, local flow fields generated by microswimmers,…
The self-propelled motion of microscopic bodies immersed in a fluid medium is studied using molecular dynamics simulation. The advantage of the atomistic approach is that the detailed level of description allows complete freedom in…
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…
Active matter comprises self-driven units, such as bacteria and synthetic microswimmers, that can spontaneously form complex patterns and assemble into functional microdevices. These processes are possible thanks to the out-of-equilibrium…
Active colloids, also known as artificial microswimmers, are self-propelled micro and nanoparticles that convert uniform sources of fuel (e.g. chemical) or uniform external driving fields (e.g. magnetic or electric) into directed motion by…
Self-assembly is the autonomous organization of components into patterns or structures: an essential ingredient of biology and a desired route to complex organization. At equilibrium, the structure is encoded through specific interactions,…
Cooperative motion in biological microswimmers is crucial for their survival as it facilitates adhesion to surfaces, formation of hierarchical colonies, efficient motion, and enhanced access to nutrients. Synthetic microswimmers currently…
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.…
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…
Most synthetic microswimmers do not reach the autonomy of their biological counterparts in terms of energy supply and diversity of motion. Here we report the first all-aqueous droplet swimmer powered by self-generated polyelectrolyte…
Biological systems often involve the self-assembly of basic components into complex and function- ing structures. Artificial systems that mimic such processes can provide a well-controlled setting to explore the principles involved and also…
Living microorganisms are capable of a tactic response to external stimuli by swimming towards or away from the stimulus source; they do so by adapting their tactic signal transduction pathways to the environment. Their self-motility thus…
We present in this fluid dynamics video a novel experimental setup with self-propelled swimmers on a free surface. The swimmers, modeled as flexible thin filaments, are subjected to external electromagnetic forcing driving a propagating…
Typical bodily and environmental fluids encountered by biological swimmers consist of dissolved macromolecules such as proteins and polymers, often rendering them non Newtonian. To mimic such scenarios, we investigate the motion of swimming…
Micro-scale swimming robots have been envisaged for many medical applications such as targeted drug delivery, where the microrobot will be expected to navigate in a fluid through channels carrying a payload. Alternatively, in many cases,…
Active droplets are artificial microswimmers built from a liquid dispersion by microfluidic tools and showing self-propelled motion. These systems hold particular interest for mimicking biological phenomena, such as some aspects of cell…
Active colloids are microscopic particles, which self-propel through viscous fluids by converting energy extracted from their environment into directed motion. We first explain how articial microswimmers move forward by generating…