Related papers: Dynamics of Purcell-type microswimmers with active…
Suspensions of motile cells are model systems for understanding the unique mechanical properties of living materials which often consist of ensembles of self-propelled particles. We present here a quantitative comparison of theory against…
Swimming by shape changes at low Reynolds number is widely used in biology and understanding how the efficiency of movement depends on the geometric pattern of shape changes is important to understand swimming of microorganisms and in…
Fish swim by undulating their bodies. These propulsive motions require coordinated shape changes of a body that interacts with its fluid environment, but the specific shape coordination that leads to robust turning and swimming motions…
Simple models are used throughout the physical sciences as a means of developing intuition, capturing phenomenology, and qualitatively reproducing observations. In studies of microswimming, simple force-dipole models are commonplace,…
The habitat of microorganisms is typically complex and viscoelastic. A natural question arises: Do polymers in a suspension of active swimmers enhance chaotic motion or promote orientational order? We address this issue by performing…
A growing body of work aims at designing and testing micron-scale synthetic swimmers. One method, inspired by the locomotion of flagellated bacteria, consists of applying a rotating magnetic field to a rigid, helically-shaped, propeller…
In swimming microorganisms and the cell cytoskeleton, inextensible fibers resist bending and twisting, and interact with the surrounding fluid to cause or resist large-scale fluid motion. In this paper, we develop a novel numerical method…
The following is an unedited version of two short articles that are forthcoming in Nature Chemical Engineering. Inspired by Purcell's classic lecture "Life at low Reynolds number", I discuss how scaling arguments, dimensional analysis, and…
Changes in calcium concentration along the sperm flagellum regulate sperm motility and hyperactivation, characterized by an increased flagellar bend amplitude and beat asymmetry, enabling the sperm to reach and penetrate the ovum (egg). The…
The motion of active polymers in a porous medium is shown to depend critically on flexibilty, activity and degree of polymerization. For given Peclet number, we observe a transition from localisation to diffusion as the stiffness of the…
Swimming at low Reynolds number in Newtonian fluids is only possible through non-reciprocal body deformations due to the kinematic reversibility of the Stokes equations. We consider here a model swimmer consisting of two linked spheres,…
Inspired by the classical Kepler and Rutherford problem, we investigate an analogous set-up in the context of active microswimmers: the behavior of a deformable microswimmer in a swirl flow. First we identify new steady bound states in the…
In this paper we study a mathematical model of one-dimensional swimmers performing a planar motion while fully immersed in a viscous fluid. The swimmers are assumed to be of small size, and all inertial effects are neglected. Hydrodynamic…
The hydrodynamic interactions of a suspension of self-propelled particles are studied using a direct numerical simulation method which simultaneously solves for the host fluid and the swimming particles. A modified version of the "Smoothed…
Taylor's swimming sheet is a classical model of microscale propulsion and pumping. Many biological fluids and substances are fibrous, having a preferred direction in their microstructure; for example cervical mucus is formed of polymer…
Microorganisms living in microfluidic environments often form multi-species swarms, where they can leverage collective motions to achieve enhanced transport and spreading. Nevertheless, there is a general lack of physical understandings of…
We theoretically describe the dynamics of swimmer populations confined in thin liquid films. We first demonstrate that hydrodynamic interactions between confined swimmers only depend on their shape and are independent of their specific…
A simple way to generate propulsion at low Reynolds number is to periodically oscillate a passive flexible filament. Here we present a macroscopic experimental investigation of such a propulsive mechanism. A robotic swimmer is constructed…
Traditional locomotion strategies become ineffective at low Reynolds numbers, where viscous forces predominate over inertial forces. To adapt, microorganisms have evolved specialized structures like cilia and flagella for efficient…
A simple mean-field micro-swimmer model is presented. The model is inspired by the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of multi-component fluids that undergo chemical reactions. These thermodynamics can be rigorously described in the context of…