Related papers: Active particles crossing sharp viscosity gradient…
Microswimmers in nature often experience spatial gradients of viscosity. In this work we develop theoretical results for the dynamics of active particles, biological or otherwise, swimming through viscosity gradients. We model the active…
Organisms often swim through density stratified fluids. In this Letter, we investigate the dynamics of small active particles swimming in density gradients and report theoretical evidence of taxis as a result of density stratification…
Organisms often swim through fluids that are spatially inhomogeneous. If the fluids are polymeric, gradients in polymer concentration may lead to gradients in both fluid viscosity and elasticity. In this letter, we present theoretical…
Many biological active agents respond to gradients of environmental cues by redirecting their motion. Besides the well-studied prominent examples such as photo- and chemotaxis, there has been considerable recent interest in topotaxis, i.e.\…
Active fluids can develop spontaneous flow instabilities and complex patterns. However, spatio-temporal control of active particles has remained challenging, despite its relevance in biological and applied contexts. Here, we harnessed…
In this paper, we explore the hydrodynamics of spheroidal active particles in viscosity gradients. This work provides a more accurate modeling approach, in comparison to spherical particles, for anisotropic organisms like Paramecium…
Many fascinating properties of biological active matter crucially depend on the capacity of constituting entities to perform directed motion, e.g., molecular motors transporting vesicles inside cells or bacteria searching for food. While…
In this work, we analyze the motion of an active particle, modeled as a spherical squirmer, in linearly varying viscosity fields. In general, the presence of a particle will disturb a background viscosity field and the disturbance generated…
Motivated by the observation of non-exponential run-time distributions of bacterial swimmers, we propose a minimal phenomenological model for taxis of active particles whose motion is controlled by an internal clock. The ticking of the…
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…
The motility of microorganisms is influenced greatly by their hydrodynamic interactions with the fluidic environment they inhabit. We show by direct experimental observation of the bi-flagellated alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii that fluid…
Swimming microorganisms can influence the diffusion of passive particles. The effect of this swimmer-particle interaction depends on different properties, such as the hydrodynamic field of the swimmer and the relative sizes of…
We develop a general hydrodynamic theory describing a system of interacting actively propelling particles of arbitrary shape suspended in a viscous fluid. We model the active part of the particle motion using a slip velocity prescribed on…
We present a versatile perturbative calculation scheme to determine the mobility matrix for two and more particles in a low Reynolds number fluid with spatially variant viscosity. Assuming an asymptotic non-constant viscosity perturbation…
We experimentally study the dynamics of active particles (APs) in a viscoelastic fluid under various geometrical constraints such as flat walls, spherical obstacles and cylindrical cavities. We observe that the main effect of the confined…
There are many examples of driven and active matter systems containing particles that exhibit circular motion with different chiralities, such as swimming bacteria near surfaces or certain types of self-driven colloidal particles. Circular…
Microscopic active droplets are able to swim autonomously in viscous flows: this puzzling feature stems from solute exchanges with the surrounding fluid via surface reactions or their spontaneous solubilisation, and the interfacial flows…
We investigate theoretically the collective dynamics of soft active particles living in a viscous fluid. We focus on a minimal model for active but non-motile particles consisting of $N>1$ elastic dimers deformed by active stresses and…
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…
Particles such as microplastics and phytoplankton suspended in the water column in the natural environment are often subject to the action of surface gravity waves. By modelling such anisotropic particles as small spheroids that slowly…