Related papers: Symmetry-Breaking Motility
Active Brownian particles (ABPs, such as self-phoretic colloids) swim at fixed speed $v$ along a body-axis ${\bf u}$ that rotates by slow angular diffusion. Run-and-tumble particles (RTPs, such as motile bacteria) swim with constant $\u$…
In the presence of an obstacle, active particles condensate into a surface "wetting" layer due to persistent motion. If the obstacle is asymmetric, a rectification current arises in addition to wetting. Asymmetric geometries are therefore…
Cell spreading is investigated at various scales in order to understand motility of living cells which is essential for a range of physiological activities in higher organisms as well as in microbes. At a microscopic scale, it has been seen…
Active Brownian motion commonly assumes spherical overdamped particles. However, self-propelled particles are often neither symmetric nor overdamped yet underlie random fluctuations from their surroundings. Active Brownian motion has…
We show that the recent experimental observation of the rectification of swimming bacteria in a system with an array of asymmetric barriers occurs due to the ballistic component of the bacteria trajectories introduced by the bacterial…
The persistent motion of bacteria produces clusters with a stationary cluster size distribution (CSD). Here we develop a minimal model for bacteria in a narrow channel to assess the relative importance of motility diversity (i.e.…
We study active surface wetting using a minimal model of bacteria that takes into account the intrinsic motility diversity of living matter. A mixture of "fast" and "slow" self-propelled Brownian particles is considered in the presence of a…
Combining experiments on active colloids, whose propulsion velocity can be controlled via a feedback loop, and theory of active Brownian motion, we explore the dynamics of an overdamped active particle with a motility that depends…
Filamentous cyanobacteria can show fascinating examples of nonequilibrium self-organization, which however are not well-understood from a physical perspective. We investigate the motility and collective organization of colonies of these…
Randomly moving active particles can be herded into directed motion by asymmetric geometric structures. Although such a rectification process has been extensively studied due to its fundamental, biological, and technological relevance, a…
The investigation of collective behaviour in dense assemblies of self-propelled active particles has been motivated by a wide range of biological phenomena. Of particular interest are dynamical transitions of cellular and sub-cellular…
In this paper we present a hydrodynamic approach to describe the motion of migrating bacteria as a special class of self-propelled systems. Analytical and numerical calculations has been performed to study the behavior of our model in the…
Active particles such as swimming bacteria or self-propelled colloids are known to spontaneously organize into fascinating large-scale dynamic structures. The emergence of these collective states from the motility pattern of the individual…
We analyze a model of active Brownian particles with non-linear friction and velocity coupling in one spatial dimension. The model exhibits two modes of motion observed in biological swarms: A disordered phase with vanishing mean velocity…
Suspensions of swimming micro-organisms provide examples of coordinated active dynamics. That has stimulated the study of a phenomenological theory combining synchronization and polar order in active matter. Here, we consider another…
Models based on surfactant driven instabilities have been employed to describe pattern formation by swarming bacteria. However, by definition, such models cannot account for the effect of bacterial sensing and decision making. Here we…
Actin growth is a fundamental biophysical process and it is, at the same time, a prototypical example of diffusion-mediated surface growth. We formulate a coupled chemo-mechanical, one-dimensional growth model encompassing both material…
The origin of biological motion can be traced back to the function of molecular motor proteins. Cytoplasmic dynein and kinesin transport organelles within our cells moving along a polymeric filament, the microtubule. The motion of the…
We theoretically study mixtures of chemically-interacting particles, which produce or consume a chemical to which they are attracted or repelled, in the most general case of many coexisting species. We find a new class of active phase…
Micromotors pushed by biological entities, like motile bacteria, constitute a fascinating way to convert chemical energy into mechanical work at the micrometer scale. Here we show, by using numerical simulations, that a properly designed…