An efficient, accurate, and flexible numerical method is proposed for the solution of the swimming problem of one or more autophoretic particles in the purely diffusive limit. The method relies on successive boundary element ...

The self-propulsion of a spherical squirmer - a model swimming organism that achieves locomotion via steady tangential movement of its surface - is quantified across the transition from viscously to inertially dominated ...

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 ...

Both natural and artificial small-scale swimmers may often self-propel in environments subject to complex geometrical constraints. While most past theoretical work on low-Reynolds number locomotion addressed idealised ...

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, ...

A well-developed method to induce mixing on microscopic scales is to exploit flows generated by steady streaming. Steady streaming is a classical fluid dynamics phenomenon whereby a time-periodic forcing in the bulk or ...

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 ...

Janus particles with the ability to move phoretically in self-generated chemical concentration gra- dients are model systems for active matter. Their motion typically consists of straight paths with rotational diffusion ...

Bacteria predate plants and animals by billions of years. Today, they are the world’s smallest cells, yet they represent the bulk of the world’s biomass and the main reservoir of nutrients for higher organisms. Most bacteria ...

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 ...

Peritrichous bacteria swim in viscous fluids by rotating multiple helical flagellar filaments. As the bacterium swims forward, all its flagella rotate in synchrony behind the cell in a tight helical bundle. When the bacterium ...

Artificial phoretic particles swim using self-generated gradients in chemical species (self-diffusiophoresis) or charges and currents (self-electrophoresis). These particles can be used to study the physics of collective ...

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 ...

It is now well established that nearby beating pairs of eukaryotic flagella or cilia typically synchronize in phase. A substantial body of evidence supports the hypothesis that hydrodynamic coupling between the active ...

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 ...

Flagellated bacteria on nutrient-rich substrates can differentiate into a swarming state and move in dense swarms across surfaces. A recent experiment measured the flow in the fluid around an Escherichia coli swarm (Wu, ...

Swimming cells and microorganisms are a critical component of many biological processes. In order to better interpret experimental studies of low Reynolds number swimming, we combine experimental and numerical methods to ...

Motivated by recent experiments, we consider the hydrodynamic capture of a microswimmer near a stationary spherical obstacle. Simulations of model equations show that a swimmer approaching a small spherical colloid is ...

Many microfluidic devices use macroscopic pressure differentials to overcome viscous friction and generate flows in microchannels. In this work, we investigate how the chemical and geometric properties of the channel walls ...