Related papers: Janus microswimmers are poor hydrodynamic mixers
Collective behaviour in suspensions of microswimmers is often dominated by the impact of long-ranged hydrodynamic interactions. These phenomena include active turbulence, where suspensions of pusher bacteria at sufficient densities exhibit…
Microswimmers are exposed in nature to crowded environments and their transport properties depend in a subtle way on the interaction with obstacles. Here, we investigate a model for a single ideal circle swimmer exploring a two-dimensional…
Starting from a microscopic model for a spherically symmetric active Janus particle, we study the interactions between two such active motors. The ambient fluid mediates a long range hydrodynamic interaction between two motors. This…
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…
An artificial microswimmer drifts in response to spatio-temporal modulations of an activating suspension medium. We consider two competing mechanisms capable of influencing its tactic response: angular fluctuations, which help it explore…
Understanding mixing and transport of passive scalars in active fluids is important to many natural (e.g. algal blooms) and industrial (e.g. biofuel, vaccine production) processes. Here, we study the mixing of a passive scalar (dye) in…
Ionic and molecular selectivity is considered unique for the nanoscale and not realizable in microfluidics. This is due to the scale-matching problem -- a difficulty to match the dimensions of ions and electrostatic potential screening…
Typical bodily and environmental fluids encountered by biological swimmers consist of dissolved macromolecules such as proteins and polymers, often rendering them non Newtonian. To mimic such scenarios, we investigate the motion of swimming…
Janus motors with chemically active and inactive hemispheres can operate only under nonequilibrium conditions where detailed balance is broken by fluxes of chemical species that establish a nonequilibrium state. A microscopic model for…
The emerging field of self-driven active particles in fluid environments has recently created significant interest in the biophysics and bioengineering communities owing to their promising future biomedical and technological applications.…
Understanding the collective actuation of microscopic structures driven by external fields can lead to the development of next-generation autonomous machines. With this goal in mind, we investigated light-induced collective motion of…
Active matter classifies systems consisting of self-propelled units which convert the energy stored locally or extracted from their environment into directed motion. It has recently attracted considerable attention due to rich new physics…
It has been shown that an anisotropic liquid crystalline (LC) environment can be used to guide the self-propulsion dynamics of dispersed microswimmers, such as bacteria. This type of composite system is named "living nematic" (LN). In the…
The interaction between swimming microorganisms or artificial self-propelled colloids and passive (tracer) particles in a fluid leads to enhanced diffusion of the tracers. This enhancement has attracted strong interest, as it could lead to…
The diffusion of a Janus rod-shaped nanoparticle in a dense Lennard-Jones fluid is studied using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The Janus particle is modeled as a rigid cylinder whose atoms on each half-side have different interaction…
Biological and artificial microswimmers often have to propel through a variety of environments, ranging from heterogeneous suspending media to strong geometrical confinement. Under confinement, local flow fields generated by microswimmers,…
We study an active matter system comprised of magnetic microswimmers confined in a microfluidic channel and show that it exhibits a new type of self-organized behavior. Combining analytical techniques and Brownian dynamics simulations, we…
The unique physical and optical properties of nanoparticles make their reliable and rapid assembly an important goal for nanotechnology. To this end, many competing driving forces have been targeted to control the self-assembly, though…
Biopolymer networks having a meshwork topology, e.g., extracellular matrix and mucus gels, are ubiquitous. It is an open question to understand how self-propelled agents such as Janus colloidal particles diffuse through such a biopolymer…
Swimming cells often have to self-propel through fluids displaying non-Newtonian rheology. While past theoretical work seems to indicate that stresses arising from complex fluids should systematically hinder low-Reynolds number locomotion,…