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Geometric tuning of self-propulsion for Janus catalytic particles
(Nature Publishing GroupScientific Reports, 2017-02-13)
Catalytic swimmers have attracted much attention as alternatives to biological systems for examining collective microscopic dynamics and the response to physico-chemical signals. Yet, understanding and predicting even the ...
Swimming with a cage: low-Reynolds-number locomotion inside a droplet
(Royal Society of ChemistrySoft Matter, 2017-05-07)
Inspired by recent experiments using synthetic microswimmers to manipulate droplets, we investigate the low-Reynolds-number locomotion of a model swimmer (a spherical squirmer) encapsulated inside a droplet of a comparable ...
Bubble-based acoustic micropropulsors: active surfaces and mixers.
(Royal Society of ChemistryLab on a chip, 2017-04-04)
Acoustic micropropulsors present great potential for microfluidic applications. The propulsion is based on encapsulated 20 μm bubbles excited by a contacless ultrasonic transducer. The vibrating bubbles then generate a ...
An empirical resistive-force theory for slender biological filaments in shear-thinning fluids
(American Physical SocietyPhysical Review E - Statistical, Nonlinear, Biological, and Soft Matter Physics, 2017-06-23)
Many cells exploit the bending or rotation of flagellar filaments in order to self-propel in viscous fluids. While appropriate theoretical modeling is available to capture flagella locomotion in simple, Newtonian fluids, ...
Clustering instability of focused swimmers
(IOP PublishingEurophysics Letters, 2017-02-09)
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 ...
A two-fluid model for locomotion under self-confinement
(American Physical SocietyPhysical Review Fluids, 2017-09-01)
The bacterium Helicobacter pylori causes ulcers in the stomach of humans by invading mucus layers protecting epithelial cells. It does so by chemically changing the rheological properties of the mucus from a high-viscosity ...
Spontaneous oscillations of elastic filaments induced by molecular motors.
(The Royal SocietyJournal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2017-11)
It is known from the wave-like motion of microtubules in motility assays that the piconewton forces that motors produce can be sufficient to bend the filaments. In cellular phenomena such as cytosplasmic streaming, molecular ...
Helical propulsion in shear-thinning fluids
(Cambridge University PressJournal of Fluid Mechanics, 2017-02-01)
Swimming micro-organisms often have to propel themselves in complex non-Newtonian fluids. We carry out experiments with self-propelling helical swimmers driven by an externally rotating magnetic field in shear-thinning ...
Microscale flow dynamics of ribbons and sheets
(Royal Society of ChemistrySoft Matter, 2017-01-18)
Numerical study of the hydrodynamics of thin sheets and ribbons presents difficulties associated with resolving multiple length scales. To circumvent these difficulties, asymptotic methods have been developed to describe ...
Autophoretic flow on a torus
(American Physical SocietyPhysical Review Fluids, 2017-03-02)
Phoretic swimmers provide new avenues to study nonequilibrium statistical physics and are also hailed as a promising technology for bioengineering at the cellular scale. Exact solutions for the locomotion of such swimmers ...