Related papers: Rechargeable self-assembled droplet microswimmers …
An artificial microswimmer drifts in response to spatio-temporal modulations of an activating suspension medium. We consider two competing mechanisms capable of influencing its tactic response: angular fluctuations, which help it explore…
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 develop a minimal hydrodynamic model, without an orientational order parameter, for assemblies of contractile swimmers encapsulated in a droplet of a binary-fluid emulsion. Our model uses two coupled scalar order parameters, $\phi$ and…
Systems of motile microorganisms exhibit a multitude of collective phenomena, including motility-induced phase separation and turbulence. Sensing of the environment and adaptation of movement plays an essential role in the emergent…
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,…
In isotropic fluids like water, micrometer-scale swimmers have evolved swim strokes to translate despite their tiny size. As described by Purcell in his Scallop Theorem, reciprocal motions, like those performed by a scallop, cannot drive…
Suspensions of swimming micro-organisms are known to undergo intricate collective dynamics as a result of hydrodynamic and collision interactions. Micro-swimmers, such as bacteria and micro-algae, naturally live and have evolved in complex…
Hot microswimmers are self-propelled Brownian particles that exploit local heating for their directed self-thermophoretic motion. We provide a pedagogical overview of the key physical mechanisms underlying this promising new technology. It…
Various microswimmers move along circles rather than straight lines due to their swimming mechanisms, body shapes or hydrodynamic effects. Here, we adopt the concepts of stochastic thermodynamics to analyze circle swimmers confined in a…
Mechanisms of locomotion in microscopic systems are of great interest not only for technological applications, but also for the sake of understanding, and potentially harnessing, processes far from thermal equilibrium. Down-scaling is a…
The current work studies the dynamics of a microswimmer in pressure-driven flow of a weakly viscoelastic fluid. Employing the second-order fluid model, we show that the self-propelling swimmer experiences a viscoelastic swimming lift in…
Micron-sized self-propelled (active) particles can be considered as model systems for characterizing more complex biological organisms like swimming bacteria or motile cells. We produce asymmetric microswimmers by soft lithography and study…
Interactions between active individuals in animal collectives lead to emergent responses that remain elusive in synthetic soft matter. Here, shape-morphing polymers are used to create bio-inspired transient solids that self-assemble with…
The emerging field of self-driven active particles in fluid environments has recently created significant interest in the biophysics and bioengineering communities owing to their promising future biomedical and technological applications.…
The self-propulsion of artificial and biological microswimmers (i.e., active colloidal particles) has often been modelled by using a force and a torque entering into the overdamped equations for the Brownian motion of passive particles.…
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…
We employ three numerical methods to explore the motion of low Reynolds number swimmers, modeling the hydrodynamic interactions by means of the Oseen tensor approximation, lattice Boltzmann simulations and multiparticle collision dynamics.…
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,…
Flow transport in confined spaces is ubiquitous in technological processes, ranging from separation and purification of pharmaceutical ingredients by microporous membranes and drug delivery in biomedical treatment to chemical and biomass…
Deformability is a central feature of many types of microswimmers, e.g. for artificially generated self-propelled droplets. Here, we analyze deformable bead-spring microswimmers in an externally imposed solvent flow field as simple…