Related papers: Interfacial activity dynamics of confined active d…
Emergent phenomena share the fascinating property of not being obvious consequences of the design of the system in which they appear. This characteristic is no less relevant when attempting to simulate such phenomena, given that the outcome…
Symmetry breaking is essential for biological microswimmers to achieve locomotion in viscous environments. Such asymmetry in the swimming mechanism enables the generation of directional forces that overcome fluid resistance, leading to…
The interplay between the chirality of many biological molecules and the energy injected at small length-scales as the result of biological processes is at the base of the life of the cells. With the aim of unveiling the connection between…
Concentration gradients play a critical role in embryogenesis, bacterial locomotion, as well as the motility of active particles. Particles develop concentration profiles around them by dissolution, adsorption, or the reactivity of surface…
We formulate a model for the dynamic growth of a membrane developing in a flow as the result of a precipitation reaction, a situation inspired by recent microfluidic experiments. The precipitating solid introduces additional forces on the…
Self-propulsion of chemically active droplet and phoretic disk has been widely studied; however, most research overlooks the influence of disk shape on swimming dynamics. Inspired by the experimentally observed prolate composite droplets…
The present study deals with the numerical as well as asymptotic analysis of the electrohydrodynamic interaction between two deformable droplets in a confined shear flow. Considering both the phases as leaky dielectric, we have performed…
Understanding and modulating the cross-stream motion of a surfactant-coated droplet in pressure driven flow has great implications in many practical applications. A combination of interfacial viscosity and Marangoni stress acting over a…
We study the thermodynamics of binary mixtures with the volume fraction of the minority component less than the amount required to form a flat interface and show that the surface tension dominated equilibrium phase of the mixture forms a…
Amorphous glassy materials of diverse nature -- concentrated emulsions, granular materials, pastes, molecular glasses -- display complex flow properties, intermediate between solid and liquid, which are at the root of their use in many…
The design of artificial microswimmers is often inspired by the strategies of natural microorganisms. Many of these creatures exploit the fact that elasticity breaks the time-reversal symmetry of motion at low Reynolds numbers, but this…
A popular method to induce synthetic propulsion at the microscale is to use the forces created by surface-produced gas bubbles inside the asymmetric body of a catalytic swimmer (referred to in the literature as microrocket). Gas bubbles…
In the field of microdroplet manipulation, optical tweezers have been used to form and grow droplets, to transport them, or to measure forces between droplet pairs. However, the exploration of out-of-equilibrium phenomena in optically…
Droplets confined in a microfluidic channel often exhibit intriguing shapes, primarily attributable to complex hydrodynamic interactions over small scales. We show that effect of varied substrate wettability conditions may further…
Complex interactions between cellular systems and their surrounding extracellular matrices are emerging as important mechanical regulators of cell functions such as proliferation, motility, and cell death, and such cellular systems are…
The emergence of hydrodynamic bend instabilities in ordered suspensions of active particles is widely observed across diverse living and synthetic systems, and is considered to be governed by dipolar active stresses generated by the…
The mechanism of hydrodynamics-induced pairing of soft particles, namely closed bilayer membranes (vesicles, a model system for red blood cells) and drops, is studied numerically with a special attention paid to the role of the confinement…
Microorganisms can preferentially orient and move along gradients of a chemo-attractant (i.e., chemotax) while colonies of many microorganisms can collectively undergo complex dynamics in response to chemo-attractants that they themselves…
The past few years have seen many advances in our understanding of the dynamics of polymeric fluids. These include improvements on the successful reptation theory; an emerging molecular theory of semiflexible chain dynamics; and an…
Animal morphogenesis often involves significant shape changes of epithelial tissue sheets. Great progress has been made in understanding the underlying cellular driving forces and their coordination through biomechanical feedback loops.…