Related papers: Motility and pair-wise interactions of chemically …
We investigate experimentally the behavior of self-propelled water-in-oil droplets, confined in capillaries of different square and circular cross-sections. The droplet's activity comes from the formation of swollen micelles at its…
Collective behaviors such as swarming, chemical signaling, and clustering are fundamental to biological microorganisms, enabling hierarchical colony formation, coordinated motion, and enhanced nutrient accessibility crucial for their…
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.…
Active droplets are artificial microswimmers built from a liquid dispersion by microfluidic tools and showing self-propelled motion. These systems hold particular interest for mimicking biological phenomena, such as some aspects of cell…
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…
Interactions among biologically active agents is facilitated by their self-generated chemical and hydrodynamic fields. In order to elucidate the pair-wise interactions between such micro-organisms, we employ active droplets as a model…
Microorganisms navigating through narrow spaces encounter significant hydrodynamic challenges. To overcome these constraints and sustain efficient motion, they employ adaptive strategies, including adaptive oscillatory body deformations.…
We numerically study the dynamics of a three-dimensional contractile fluid droplet in the bulk and under confinement. We show that varying activity leads to a variety of shapes and motile regimes whose motion is driven by an interplay…
Ciliated microswimmers and flagellated bacteria alter their swimming trajectories to follow the direction of an applied electric field exhibiting electrotaxis. Both for matters of application and physical modelling, it is instructive to…
To explore and react to their environment, living micro-swimmers have developed sophisticated strategies for locomotion - in particular, motility with multiple gaits. To understand the physical principles associated with such a behavioural…
The intriguing role of the presence of solutes in the activity of a self-propelling droplet is investigated. A system of self-propelling micron sized 4-pentyl-4-biphenylcarbonitrile (5CB) droplets in an aqueous solution of…
We investigate the collective dynamics of self-propelled droplets, confined in a one dimensional micro-fluidic channel. On one hand, neighboring droplets align and form large trains of droplets moving in the same direction. On the other…
How liquid transport occurs in confined spaces is relevant to many industrial and lab-scale processes, ranging from enhanced oil recovery to drug delivery systems. In this work, we investigate propelling microdroplets that form from…
Geometric confinements are frequently encountered in the biological world and strongly affect the stability, topology, and transport properties of active suspensions in viscous flow. Based on a far-field analytical model, the…
Biological microswimmers, like euglena, deform their body shape to swim through tight confinements having length scales comparable to the microswimmer length scale. Recently, it was shown that self-propelling active droplets can also…
Active emulsions can spontaneously form self-propelled droplets or phoretic micropumps. It has been predicted that the interaction with their self-generated chemical fields can lead to multistable higher-order flows and chemodynamic…
We develop a minimal hydrodynamic model, without an orientational order parameter, for assemblies of contractile swimmers encapsulated in a droplet of a binary-fluid emulsion. Our model uses two coupled scalar order parameters, $\phi$ and…
To further understand the complex behavior of swimming microorganisms, the spontaneous motion of nonliving matter provides essential insights. While substantial research has focused on quantitatively analyzing complex behavioral patterns,…
Active droplets swim as a result of the nonlinear advective coupling of the distribution of chemical species they consume or release with the Marangoni flows created by their non-uniform surface distribution. Most existing models focus on…
Walking droplets -- millimetric oil droplets that self-propel across the surface of a vibrating fluid bath -- exhibit striking emergent statistics that remain only partially understood. In particular, in a variety of experiments, a robust…