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 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 ...

Cellular biology abound with filaments interacting through fluids, from intracellular microtubules, to rotating flagella and beating cilia. While previous work has demonstrated the complexity of capturing nonlocal hydrodynamic ...

Singular solutions of the Stokes equations play important roles in a variety of fluid dynamics problems. They allow the calculation of exact flows, are the basis of the boundary integral methods used in numerical computations, ...

One of the aspirations for artificial microswimmers is their application in noninvasive medicine. For any practical use, adequate mechanisms enabling control of multiple artificial swimmers will be of paramount importance. ...

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 ...

Internal phoretic flows due to the interactions of solid boundaries with local chemical gradients may be created using chemical patterning. Alternatively, we demonstrate here that internal flows might also be induced by ...

Internal phoretic flows due to the interactions of solid boundaries with local chemical gradients may be created using chemical patterning. Alternatively, we demonstrate here that internal flows might also be induced by ...

Acoustic microswimmers present a great potential for microfluidic applications and targeted drug delivery. Here, we introduce armored microbubbles (size range, 10–20 μm) made by three-dimensional microfabrication, which ...

The drag anisotropy of slender filaments is a critical physical property allowing swimming in low-Reynolds number flows, and without it linear translation is impossible. Here we show that, in contrast, net rotation can ...

Ribbons are long narrow strips possessing three distinct material length scales (thickness, width, and length) which allow them to produce unique shapes unobtainable by wires or filaments. For example, when a ribbon has ...

The total force exerted on a small rigid body by an acoustic field in a viscous fluid is addressed analytically in the limit where the typical size of the particle is smaller than both the viscous diffusion length scale ...

Many small organisms self-propel in viscous fluids using travelling wave-like deformations of their bodies or appendages. Examples include small nematodes moving through soil using whole-body undulations or spermatozoa ...

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 ...

Active particles disturb the fluid around them as force dipoles, or stresslets, which govern their collective dynamics. Unlike swimming speeds, the stresslets of active particles are rarely determined due to the lack of a ...

Microorganisms move in challenging environments by periodic changes in body shape. In contrast, current artificial microrobots cannot actively deform, exhibiting at best passive bending under external fields. Here, by ...

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 ...