Related papers: Active particles crossing sharp viscosity gradient…
We study the origin of buoyancy forces acting on a larger particle moving in a granular medium subject to horizontal shaking and its corrections before fluidization. In the fluid limit Archimedes' law is verified; before the limit memory…
When attracted by a stimulus (e. g. light), microswimmers can build up very densely at a constriction and thus cause clogging. The micro-alga \textit{Chlamydomonas Reinhardtii} is used here as a model system to study this phenomenon. Its…
Locomotion is essential for living cells. It enables bacteria and algae to explore space for food, cancer to spread, and immune system to fight infections. Motile cells display trajectories of intriguing complexity, from regular (e.g.…
Active gels are a class of biologically-relevant material containing embedded agents that spontaneously generate forces acting on a sparse filament network. In vitro experiments of protein filaments and molecular motors have revealed a…
Spiral waves in active media react to small perturbations as particle-like objects. Here we apply the asymptotic theory to the interaction of spiral waves with a localized inhomogeneity, which leads to a novel prediction: drift of the…
The locomotion and design of microswimmers are topical issues of current fundamental and applied research. In addition to numerous living and artificial active microswimmers, a passive microswimmer was identified only recently: a soft,…
Curvature plays a central role in the proper function of many biological processes. With active matter being a standard framework for understanding many aspects of the physics of life, it is natural to ask what effect curvature has on the…
Dynamical heterogeneities in a colloidal fluid close to gelation are studied by means of computer simulations. A clear distinction between some fast particles and the rest, slow ones, is observed, yielding a picture of the gel composed by…
Active matter exhibits various forms of non-equilibrium states in the absence of external forcing, including macroscopic steady-state currents. Such states are often too complex to be modelled from first principles and our understanding of…
Many swimming microorganisms, such as bacteria and sperm, use flexible flagella to move through viscoelastic media in their natural environments. In this paper we address the effects a viscoelastic fluid has on the motion and beating…
Recent research has shown that motile cells can adapt their mode of propulsion to the mechanical properties of the environment in which they find themselves--crawling in some environments while swimming in others. The latter can involve…
A common feature of biological self-organization is how active agents communicate with each other or their environment via chemical signaling. Such communications, mediated by self-generated chemical gradients, have consequences for both…
Transport properties of particles in confining geometries show very specific characteristics as lateral drift, oscillatory movement between lateral walls or the deformation of flexible fibers. These dynamics result from viscous friction…
The microalga Chlamydomonas Reinhardtii (CR) is used here as a model system to study the effect of complex environments on the swimming of micro-organisms. Its motion can be modelled by a run and tumble mechanism so that it describes a…
Microorganisms are rarely found in Nature swimming freely in an unbounded fluid. Instead, they typically encounter other organisms, hard walls, or deformable boundaries such as free interfaces or membranes. Hydrodynamic interactions between…
The biological fluids encountered by self-propelled cells display complex microstructures and rheology. We consider here the general problem of low-Reynolds number locomotion in a complex fluid. {Building on classical work on the transport…
We study the interplay of activity, order and flow through a set of coarse-grained equations governing the hydrodynamic velocity, concentration and stress fields in a suspension of active, energy-dissipating particles. We make several…
We numerically examine the driven transport of an overdamped self-propelled particle through a two-dimensional array of circular obstacles. A detailed analysis of transport quantifiers (mobility and diffusivity) has been performed for two…
The formation of dynamical patterns is one of the most striking features of nonequilibrium physical systems. Recent work has shown that such patterns arise generically from forces that violate Newton's third law, known as nonreciprocal…
The motion of particles suspended in environmental turbulence is relevant to many scientific fields, from sediment transport to biological interactions to underwater robotics. At very small scales and simple shapes, we are able to…