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Motility is a fundamental survival strategy of bacteria to navigate porous environments. Swimming cells thrive in quiescent wetlands and sediments at the bottom of the marine water column, where they mediate many essential biogeochemical…
We explore in this paper the phenomenon of photofocusing: a coupling between flow vorticity and biased swimming of microalgae toward a light source that produces a focusing of the microswimmer suspension. We combine experiments that…
Anaerobic processes (e.g., methanogenesis and fermentation) largely contribute to element cycling and natural contaminant attenuation/mobilization, even in well-oxygenated porous environments, such as shallow aquifers. This paradox is…
Chemotaxis is the response of a particle to a gradient in the chemical composition of the environment. While it was originally observed for biological organisms, it is of great interest in the context of synthetic active particles such as…
Chemotaxis and auto-chemotaxis play an important role in many essential biological processes. We present a self-propelling artificial swimmer system which exhibits chemotaxis as well as negative auto-chemotaxis. Oil droplets in an aqueous…
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…
An active colloid is a suspension of particles that transduce free energy from their environment and use the energy to engage in intrinsically non-equilibrium activities such as growth, replication and self-propelled motility. An obvious…
Many living and artificial systems show a similar emergent behavior and collective motions on different scales, starting from swarms of bacteria to synthetic active particles, herds of mammals and crowds of people. What all these systems…
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…
The flagellated bacterium Escherichia coli is increasingly used experimentally as a self-propelled swimmer. To obtain meaningful, quantitative results that are comparable between different laboratories, reproducible protocols are needed to…
Rheotaxis is a well-known phenomenon among microbial organisms and artificial active colloids, wherein the swimmers respond to an imposed flow. We report the first experimental evidence of upstream rheotaxis by spherical active droplets. It…
Recent experiments on the green alga Chlamydomonas that swims using synchronized beating of a pair of flagella have revealed that it exhibits a run-and-tumble behavior similar to that of bacteria such as E. Coli. Using a simple purely…
A continuous route from a disordered soup of simple chemical feedstocks to a functional protocell -- a compartment that metabolizes, grows, and propagates -- remains elusive. Here, we show that a homogeneous aqueous chemical mixture…
The ability to design artificial micro/nanomachines able to perform sophisticated tasks crucially depends on the understanding of their interaction with biosystems and their compatibility with the biological environment. Here, Janus…
We consider sedimented at a solid wall particles that are immersed in water containing small additives of photosensitive ionic surfactants. It is shown that illumination with an appropriate wavelength, a beam intensity profile, shape and…
The large-scale collective behavior of biological systems can be characterized by macroscopic transport, which arises from the non-equilibrium microscopic interactions among individual constituents. A prominent example is the formation of…
Concentrated suspensions of swimming microorganisms and other forms of active matter are known to display complex, self-organized spatio-temporal patterns on scales large compared to those of the individual motile units. Despite intensive…
We describe a method for programming the autonomous navigation of active colloidal particles in response to spatial gradients in a scalar stimulus. Functional behaviors such as positive or negative chemotaxis are encoded in the particle…
Phoretic swimmers are a class of artificial active particles that has received significant attention in recent years. By making use of self-generated gradients (e.g. in temperature, electric potential or some chemical product) phoretic…
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…