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Chemotaxis of artificial microswimmers in active density waves

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posted on 2016-08-25, 10:33 authored by Alexander Geiseler, Peter Hanggi, Fabio Marchesoni, Colm Mulhern, Sergey SavelievSergey Saveliev
© 2016 American Physical Society.Living microorganisms are capable of a tactic response to external stimuli by swimming toward or away from the stimulus source; they do so by adapting their tactic signal transduction pathways to the environment. Their self-motility thus allows them to swim against a traveling tactic wave, whereas a simple fore-rear asymmetry argument would suggest the opposite. Their biomimetic counterpart, the artificial microswimmers, also propel themselves by harvesting kinetic energy from an active medium, but, in contrast, lack the adaptive capacity. Here we investigate the transport of artificial swimmers subject to traveling active waves and show, by means of analytical and numerical methods, that self-propelled particles can actually diffuse in either direction with respect to the wave, depending on its speed and waveform. Moreover, chiral swimmers, which move along spiraling trajectories, may diffuse preferably in a direction perpendicular to the active wave. Such a variety of tactic responses is explained by the modulation of the swimmer's diffusion inside traveling active pulses.

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Physics

Published in

Physical Review E - Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics

Volume

94

Issue

1

Citation

GEISELER, A. ...et al., 2016. Chemotaxis of artificial microswimmers in active density waves. Physical Review E, 94, 012613.

Publisher

© American Physical Society

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2016-07-15

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review E and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.94.012613

ISSN

1539-3755

eISSN

1550-2376

Language

  • en

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