Related papers: Designing phoretic micro- and nano-swimmers

Swimming microorganisms often self propel in fluids with complex rheology. While past theoretical work indicates that fluid viscoelasticity should hinder their locomotion, recent experiments on waving swimmers suggest a possible…

Microorganisms are able to overcome the thermal randomness of their surroundings by harvesting energy to navigate in viscous fluid environments. In a similar manner, synthetic colloidal microswimmers are capable of mimicking complex…

We theoretically describe the dynamics of swimmer populations confined in thin liquid films. We first demonstrate that hydrodynamic interactions between confined swimmers only depend on their shape and are independent of their specific…

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…

Microswimmers typically move near walls, which can strongly influence their motion. However, direct experimental measurements of swimmer-wall separation remain elusive to date. Here, we determine this separation for model catalytic…

External forces acting on a microswimmer can feed back on its self-propulsion mechanism. We discuss this load response for a generic microswimmer that swims by cyclic shape changes. We show that the change in cycle frequency is proportional…

We consider arbitrary-shaped microswimmers of spherical topology and propose a framework for expressing their slip velocity in terms of tangential basis functions defined on the boundary of the swimmer using the Helmholtz decomposition.…

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…

Microswimmers are encountered in a wide variety of biophysical settings. When interacting with flow fields, they show interesting dynamical features such as trapping, clustering, and preferential orientation. One important step towards the…

Squirmers are models of a class of microswimmers, such as ciliated organisms and phoretic particles, that self-propel in fluids without significant deformation of their body shape. Available techniques for their simulation are based on the…

We study theoretically the phoretic motion of a spheroidal particle, which generates solute gradients in the surrounding unbounded solvent via chemical reactions active on its surface in a cap-like region centered at one of the poles of the…

There is increasing evidence that mammalian cells not only crawl on substrates but can also swim in fluids. To elucidate the mechanisms of the onset of motility of cells in suspension, a model which couples actin and myosin kinetics to…

The self-propulsion of artificial and biological microswimmers (i.e., active colloidal particles) has often been modelled by using a force and a torque entering into the overdamped equations for the Brownian motion of passive particles.…

The problem of optimal microscopic swimming in a noisy environment is analyzed. A simplified model in which propulsion is generated by the relative motion of three spheres connected by immaterial links has been considered. We show that an…

Flagellated bacteria are hydrodynamically attracted to rigid walls, yet past work shows a 'hovering' state where they swim stably at a finite height above surfaces. We use numerics and theory to reveal the physical origin of hovering.…

We calculate the hydrodynamic force on a small spherical, unsteady squirmer moving with a time-dependent velocity in a fluid at rest, taking into account convective and unsteady fluid inertia effects in perturbation theory. Our results…

We examine swimmers comprising of two rigid spheres which oscillate periodically along their axis of symmetry, considering both when the oscillation is in phase and anti-phase, and study the effects of fluid viscoelasticity on their net…

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…

In marine plankton, many swimming species can perceive their environment with flow sensors. Can they use this flow information to travel faster in turbulence? To address this question, we consider plankters swimming at constant speed, whose…

Living microorganisms are capable of a tactic response to external stimuli by swimming towards or away from the stimulus source; they do so by adapting their tactic signal transduction pathways to the environment. Their self-motility thus…