Related papers: Reorientation dynamics of microswimmers at fluid-f…
Microswimmers display an intriguing ability to navigate through fluids with spatially varying viscosity, a behavior known as viscotaxis, which plays a crucial role in guiding their motion. In this study, we reveal that the orientation…
Viscoelasticity governs the locomotion strategies of deformable microorganisms, rendering it a fundamental mechanical property of microbial motility and an integral component in the design of envisioned microbots. Recent studies have shown…
Micro-swimmer locomotion in heterogeneous media is increasingly relevant in biological physics due to the prevalence of microorganisms in complex environments. A model for such porous media is the Brinkman fluid which accounts for a sparse…
In this note, we study the effect of viscosity gradients on the energy dissipated by the motion of microswimmers and the associated efficiency of that motion. Using spheroidal squirmer model swimmers in weak linearly varying viscosity…
The ability of microswimmers to deploy optimal propulsion strategies is of paramount importance for their locomotory performance and survival at low Reynolds numbers. Although for perfectly spherical swimmers minimum dissipation requires a…
We study how hydrodynamic interactions affect the collective behaviour of active particles suspended in a fluid at high concentrations, with particular attention to lubrication forces which appear when the particles are very close to one…
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…
Biological microswimmers alter their motility in complex corner geometries, facilitating their survival. However, the dynamical features of low-Reynolds-number swimming at corners remain undefined. Here, we use active droplet microswimmers…
An exact description is provided of an almost spherical fluid vesicle with a fixed area and a fixed enclosed volume locally deformed by external normal forces bringing two nearby points on the surface together symmetrically. The conformal…
Odd viscosity is a property of chiral active fluids with broken time-reversal and parity symmetries. We show that the flow of such a fluid around a rotating axisymmetric body is exactly solvable and use this solution to determine the…
Active proteins and membrane-bound motors exert force dipole flows along fluid interfaces and lipid bilayers. We develop a Hamiltonian framework for the interactions of pusher and puller dipoles embedded in an incompressible two-dimensional…
We investigate the hydrodynamic interactions between microorganisms swimming at low Reynolds number. By considering simple model swimmers, and combining analytic and numerical approaches, we investigate the time-averaged flow field around a…
Three-dimensional simulations with fully resolved hydrodynamics are performed to study the dynamics of a single squirmer under gravity, in order to clarify its motion in the vicinity of a flat plate. Different dynamics emerge for different…
The majority of studies on self-propelled particles and microswimmers concentrates on objects that do not feature a deterministic bending of their trajectory. However, perfect axial symmetry is hardly found in reality, and shape-asymmetric…
We identify the presence of a continuum percolation transition in model suspensions of pusher-type microswimmers. The clusters dynamically aggregate and disaggregate resulting from a competition of attractive and repulsive hydrodynamic and…
Marine plankton are usually modeled as settling elongated micro-swimmers. For the first time, we consider the torque induced by fluid inertia on such swimmers, and we discover that they spontaneously swim in the direction opposite to…
We run numerical simulations of strongly confined suspensions of model spherical swimmers called "squirmers". Because of the confinement, the Stokeslet dipoles generated by the particles are quickly screened and the far-field flow is…
The motion of microorganisms in their natural habitat is strongly influenced by their propulsion mechanisms, geometrical constraints, and random fluctuations. Here, we study numerically the first-passage-time (FPT) statistics of…
We use the boundary element method to study the low-Reynolds number locomotion of a spherical model microorganism in a circular tube. The swimmer propels itself by tangen- tial or normal surface motion in a tube whose radius is on the order…
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,…