Related papers: Motility and rotation of multi-timescale microswim…

We here present two simplified models aimed at describing the long-term, irregular behaviours observed in the rheological response of certain complex fluids, such as periodic oscillations or chaotic-like variations. Both models exploit the…

Large scale features of a randomly isotropically forced incompressible and unbounded rotating fluid are examined in perturbation theory. At first order in both the random force amplitude and the angular velocity we find two types of…

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…

We present a quantitative analysis on the response of a dilute active suspension of self-propelled rods (swimmers) in a planar channel subjected to an imposed shear flow. To best capture the salient features of shear-induced effects, we…

In this work, we analyze the motion of an active particle, modeled as a spherical squirmer, in linearly varying viscosity fields. In general, the presence of a particle will disturb a background viscosity field and the disturbance generated…

Contrasting the well explored problem on how to steer a macroscopic agent like an airplane or a moon lander to optimally reach a target, "optimal microswimming", i.e. the quest for the optimal navigation strategy for microswimmers, remains…

Navigation in turbulent environments is a fundamental challenge for biological and artificial microswimmers. While most existing studies focus on adapting motility or steering, the role of active morphological changes in navigation remains…

Micro-organisms expend energy moving through complex media. While propulsion speed is an important property of locomotion, efficiency is another factor that may determine the swimming gait adopted by a micro-organism in order to locomote in…

One of the hallmarks of active matter is its rich nonlinear dynamics and instabilities. Recent numerical simulations of phototactic algae showed that a thin jet of swimmers, obtained from hydrodynamic focusing inside a Poiseuille flow, was…

The intricate wobbling motion of flagellated bacteria, characterized by the periodic precession of the cell body, is a determinant factor in their motility and navigation within complex fluid environments. While well-studied in quiescent…

We develop a maximum likelihood method to infer relevant physical properties of elongated active particles. Using individual trajectories of advected swimmers as input, we are able to accurately determine their rotational diffusion…

Many species of phytoplankton migrate vertically near the surface of the ocean, either in search of light or nutrients. These motile organisms are affected by ocean waves at the surface. We derive a set of wave-averaged equations to…

Recent research has shown that motile cells can adapt their mode of propulsion to the mechanical properties of the environment in which they find themselves--crawling in some environments while swimming in others. The latter can involve…

The rotational dynamics of anisotropic particles advected in a turbulent fluid flow are important in many industrial and natural setting. Particle rotations are controlled by small scale properties of turbulence that are nearly universal,…

The swimming of a sphere immersed in a viscous incompressible fluid with inertia is studied for surface modulations of small amplitude on the basis of the Navier-Stokes equations. The mean swimming velocity and the mean rate of dissipation…

In this Letter, we study the collective behaviour of a large number of self-propelled microswimmers immersed in a fluid. Using unprecedently large-scale lattice Boltzmann simulations, we reproduce the transition to bacterial turbulence. We…

We use a three-bead-spring model to investigate the dynamics of bi-flagellate micro-swimmers near a surface. While the primary dynamics and scattering are governed by geometric-dependent direct contact, the fluid flows generated by the…

The presence of obstacles is intuitively expected to hinder the diffusive transport of micro-swimmers. However, for chiral micro-swimmers, a low density of obstacles near a surface can enhance their diffusive behavior, due to the…

Unlike macroscopic swimmers, microswimmers operate in a low-Reynolds-number regime dominated by viscous forces. This paper investigates the controllability of a magnetic microswimmer composed of a spherical magnetic head and an elastic,…

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,…