Chemotaxis of artificial microswimmers in active density waves

Abstract

Living microorganisms are capable of a tactic response to external stimuli by swimming towards 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.

11 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (8)

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Brownian motion of a circle swimmer in a harmonic trap
• Self-Polarizing Microswimmers in Active Density Waves
• Taxis of Artificial Swimmers in a Spatio-Temporally Modulated Activation Medium
• Active particles in non-inertial frames: how to self-propel on a carousel
• Activated barrier crossing dynamics of a Janus particle carrying cargo
• Colloidal Brazil nut effect in microswimmer mixtures induced by motility contrast
• Cargo Towing by Artificial Swimmers
• Adiabatic elimination of inertia of the stochastic microswimmer driven by $\alpha -$stable noise