Sorting of chiral microswimmers
By Mite Mijalkov, Giovanni Volpe. 2012
157 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Microscopic swimmers, e.g., chemotactic bacteria and cells, are capable of directed motion by exerting a force on their environment. For asymmetric microswimmers, e.g., bacteria, spermatozoa and many artificial active colloidal particles, a torque is also present leading to circular motion (in two dimensions) and to helicoidal motion (in three dimensions) with a well-defined chirality. Here, we demonstrate with numerical simulations in two dimensions how the chirality of circular motion couples to chiral features present in the microswimmer environment. Levogyre and dextrogyre microswimmers as small as 50 nm can be separated and selectively trapped in chiral flowers of ellipses. Patterned microchannels can be used as funnels to rectify the microswimmer motion, as sorters to separate microswimmers based on their linear and angular velocities, and as sieves to trap microswimmers with specific parameters. We also demonstrate that these results can be extended to helicoidal motion in three dimensions.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Condensed Matter Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5b60f0b6ab48d989ff79e8b7ddff12583a61ad17
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In Biomedical Engineering
In Condensed Matter Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Active Particles in Complex and Crowded Environments (2016, background): “The resulting set of equations describing this motion in two dimensions is (Mijalkov and Volpe, 2013; van Teeffelen and Löwen, 2008; Volpe et al., 2014a) ẋ = v cosϕ+ √ 2DT ξx ẏ = v sinϕ+ √ 2DT ξy ϕ̇ = ω + √ 2DR ξϕ (8) Some examples of trajectories are shown in Figs.”