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Deformable boundaries are omnipresent in the habitats of swimming microorganisms, leading to intricate hydroelastic couplings. Employing a perturbation theory, valid for small deformations, we study the swimming dynamics of pushers and…
Microorganisms navigate through fluid, often confined by complex environments, to survive and sustain life. Inspired by this fact, we consider a model system and seek to understand the wall curvature driven dynamics of a squirmer, a…
Swimming cells and microorganisms must often move though complex fluids that contain an immersed microstructure such as polymer molecules, or filaments. In many important biological processes, such as mammalian reproduction and bacterial…
We study the trajectories of a model microorganism inside three-dimensional channels with square and rectangular cross-sections. Using (i) numerical simulations based on lattice-Boltzmann method, and (ii) analytical expressions using…
Systems of motile microorganisms exhibit a multitude of collective phenomena, including motility-induced phase separation and turbulence. Sensing of the environment and adaptation of movement plays an essential role in the emergent…
Microorganisms often encounter strong confinement and complex hydrodynamic flows while navigating their habitats. Combining finite-element methods and stochastic simulations, we study the interplay of active transport and heterogeneous…
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…
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…
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…
Biological microswimmers such as bacteria and sperm cells often encounter complex biological fluid environments. Here we use the well-known squirmer microswimmer model to show the importance of the local fluid microstructure and…
Microswimmers in suspension exhibit collective swimming behaviour, forming various self-organised structures including ordered, aggregated, and turbulent-like structures. When mixed with passive particles phase-separation is known to occur,…
Microswimmers are active particles of microscopic size that self-propel by setting the surrounding fluid into motion. According to the kind of far-field fluid flow that they induce, they are classified into pushers and pullers. Many studies…
The properties of biological microswimmers are to a large extent determined by fluid-mediated interactions, which govern their propulsion, perception of their surrounding, and the steering of their motion for feeding or in pursuit.…
We study the coupled hydrodynamics between a motile slender microswimmer and a deformable interface that separates two Newtonian fluid regions. From the disturbance field generated by the swimming motion, we quantitatively characterize the…
We present a lattice Boltzmann study of the hydrodynamics of a fully resolved squirmer, radius R, confined in a slab of fluid between two no-slip walls. We show that the coupling between hydrodynamics and short-range repulsive interactions…
Understanding the transport properties of microorganisms and self-propelled particles in porous media has important implications for human health as well as microbial ecology. In free space, most microswimmers perform diffusive random walks…
Biological microswimmers alter their motility in complex corner geometries, facilitating their survival. However, the dynamical features of low-Reynolds-number swimming at corners remain undefined. Here, we use active droplet microswimmers…
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…
We investigate theoretically the collective dynamics of a suspension of low Reynolds number swimmers that are confined to two dimensions by a thin fluid film. Our model swimmer is characterized by internal degrees of freedom which locally…
Microswimmers typically operate in complex environments. In biological systems, often diverse species are simultaneously present and interact with each other. Here, we derive a (time-dependent) particle-scale statistical description, namely…