Microswimmers in patterned environments

By Giovanni Volpe, I. Buttinoni, Dominik Vogt, Hans-Juergen Kuemmerer, C. Bechinger. 2011

449 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Tiny self-propelled swimmers capable of autonomous navigation through complex environments provide appealing opportunities for localization, pick-up and delivery of microscopic and nanoscopic objects. Inspired by motile cells and bacteria, man-made microswimmers have been created and their motion in homogeneous environments has been studied. As a first step towards more realistic conditions under which such microswimmers will be employed, here we study, experimentally and with numerical simulations, their behavior in patterned surroundings that present complex spatial features where frequent encounters with obstacles become important. To study the microswimmers as a function of their swimming behavior, we develop a novel species of microswimmers whose active motion is due to the local demixing of a critical binary liquid mixture and can be easily tuned by illumination. We show that, when microswimmers are confined to a single pore whose diameter is comparable with their swimming length, the probability of finding them at the confinement walls significantly increases compared to Brownian particles. Furthermore, in the presence of an array of periodically arranged obstacles, microswimmers can steer even perpendicularly to an applied force. Since such behavior is very sensitive to the details of their specific swimming style, it can be employed to develop advanced sorting, classification and dialysis techniques.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Condensed Matter Physics, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/183b2d29af61bd6c3327b78a76dd202b4ed65cf6

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In Biomedical Engineering

In Condensed Matter Physics

In Mechanical Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Tuned, driven, and active soft matter (2015, background): “A further possibility is to enforce demixing of a binary fluid on the heated side [358, 359, 361] or to selectively catalyze chemical reactions only on the surface”
Physics of microswimmers—single particle motion and collective behavior: a review (2014, background): “The mean square displacement of self-propelled Januscolloids on a surface has been measured as a function of fuel concentration by Howse et al. (2007) as well as by Volpe et al. (2011) for various illumination intensities.”
Active Particles in Complex and Crowded Environments (2016, background): “This effect has been observed for rods and spheres in a linear channel (Elgeti and Gompper, 2009; Volpe et al., 2011; Wensink and Löwen, 2008; Wysocki et al., 2015) as well as for bacteria in circular cavities (Vlade-”