English
Related papers

Related papers: Microswimmers in vortices: Dynamics and trapping

200 papers

Active fluids, such as suspensions of microswimmers, are known to self-organize into complex spatio-temporal flow patterns. An intriguing example is mesoscale turbulence, a state of dynamic vortex structures exhibiting a characteristic…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-07-02 Henning Reinken , Sebastian Heidenreich , Markus Bär , Sabine H. L. Klapp

The hydrodynamics of a flagellated microorganism is investigated when swimming close to a planar free-slip surface by means of numerical solu- tions of the Stokes equations obtained via a Boundary Element Method. Depending on the initial…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2017-03-31 Daniela Pimponi , Mauro Chinappi , Paolo Gualtieri , Carlo Massimo Casciola

Biological microswimmers often encounter deformable boundaries in physiological conditions; for instance, the viscoelastic walls of reproductive tract during migration of spermatozoa, or host tissue during early bacterial biofilm formation.…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-08-07 Smita S. Sontakke , Aneesha Kajampady , Mohd Suhail Rizvi , Ranabir Dey

It is known that obstacles can hydrodynamically trap bacteria and synthetic microswimmers in orbits, where the trapping time heavily depends on the swimmer flow field and noise is needed to escape the trap. Here, we use experiments and…

We perform Brownian dynamics simulations in two dimensions to study the collective behavior of circle swimmers, which are driven by both, an (effective) translational and rotational self-propulsion, and interact via steric repulsion. We…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2021-06-09 Guo-Jun Liao , Sabine H. L. Klapp

The locomotion of microorganisms and spermatozoa in complex viscoelastic fluids is of critical importance in many biological processes such as fertilization, infection, and biofilm formation. Depending on their propulsion mechanisms,…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2021-09-14 Gaojin Li , Eric Lauga , Arezoo M. Ardekani

Coherent vortical motion has been reported in a wide variety of populations including living organisms (bacteria, fishes, human crowds) and synthetic active matter (shaken grains, mixtures of biopolymers), yet a unified description of the…

Swimming micro-organisms such as flagellated bacteria and sperm cells have fascinating locomotion capabilities. Inspired by their natural motion, there is an ongoing effort to develop artificial robotic nano-swimmers for potential in-body…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2023-05-31 Jithu Paul , Yizhar Or , Oleg Gendelman

We demonstrate with experiments and simulations how microscopic self-propelled particles navigate through environments presenting complex spatial features, which mimic the conditions inside cells, living organisms and future lab-on-a-chip…

Biological Physics · Physics 2011-09-22 Giovanni Volpe , Ivo Buttinoni , Dominik Vogt , Hans-Juergen Kuemmerer , Clemens Bechinger

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…

We investigate the vortical dynamics generated during the forced exit of a circular cylinder through a quiescent free surface. While previous work on exit flows has largely emphasized cavity collapse and force generation, the formation and…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2025-09-10 Intesaaf Ashraf , Stephane Dorbolo

The survival of many microorganisms, like \textit{Leptospira} or \textit{Spiroplasma} bacteria, can depend on their ability to navigate towards regions of favorable viscosity. While this ability, called viscotaxis, has been observed in…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2018-05-23 Benno Liebchen , Paul Monderkamp , Borge ten Hagen , Hartmut Löwen

Hydrodynamical interactions of active micro-particles are pervasive in our planet's fluid environments. Hence, understanding the interactions of these self-propelled particles is essential for science and engineering. In this paper the…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2022-12-28 Yonatan Ashenafi

Active systems, from bacterial suspensions to cellular monolayers, are continuously driven out of equilibrium by local injection of energy from their constituent elements and exhibit turbulent-like and chaotic patterns. Here we demonstrate…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2016-02-04 Amin Doostmohammadi , Michael F. Adamer , Sumesh P. Thampi , Julia M. Yeomans

Unicellular microscopic organisms living in aqueous environments outnumber all other creatures on Earth. A large proportion of them are able to self-propel in fluids with a vast diversity of swimming gaits and motility patterns. In this…

Biological Physics · Physics 2021-07-14 Marcos F. Velho Rodrigues , Maciej Lisicki , Eric Lauga

It has been a long-standing problem how schooling fish optimize their motion by exploiting the vortices shed by the others. A recent experimental study showed that a pair of fish reduce energy consumption by matching the phases of their…

Biological Physics · Physics 2023-12-05 Susumu Ito , Nariya Uchida

Collective states of inanimate particles self-assemble through physical interactions and thermal motion. Despite some phenomenological resemblance, including signatures of criticality, the autonomous dynamics that binds motile agents into…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2023-02-01 Xiangzun Wang , Pin-Chuan Chen , Klaus Kroy , Viktor Holubec , Frank Cichos

Theoretical and numerical studies have shown that large-scale vortices in Protoplanetary discs can result from various hydrodynamical instabilities. Once produced, such vortices can survive nearly unchanged over a large number of rotation…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2022-10-19 Steven Rendon Restrepo , Pierre Barge

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…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2013-10-21 Marcelo A. Dias , Thomas R. Powers

The hydrodynamic flow field generated by self-propelled active particles and swimming microorganisms is strongly altered by the presence of nearby boundaries in a viscous flow. Using a simple model three-linked sphere swimmer, we show that…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2018-04-18 Abdallah Daddi-Moussa-Ider , Maciej Lisicki , Christian Hoell , Hartmut Löwen