Taxis of cargo-carrying microswimmers in traveling activity waves

Abstract

Many fascinating properties of biological active matter crucially depend on the capacity of constituting entities to perform directed motion, e.g., molecular motors transporting vesicles inside cells or bacteria searching for food. While much effort has been devoted to mimicking biological functions in synthetic systems, such as transporting a cargo to a targeted zone, theoretical studies have primarily focused on single active particles subject to various spatial and temporal stimuli. Here we study the behavior of a self-propelled particle carrying a passive cargo in a travelling activity wave and show that this active-passive dimer displays a rich, emergent tactic behavior. For cargoes with low mobility, the dimer always drifts in the direction of the wave propagation. For highly-mobile cargoes, instead, the dimer can also drift against the traveling wave. The transition between these two tactic behaviors is controlled by the ratio between the frictions of the cargo and the microswimmer. In slow activity waves the dimer can perform an active surfing of the wave maxima, with an average drift velocity equal to the wave speed. These analytical predictions, which we confirm by numerical simulations, might be useful for the future efficient design of bio-hybrid microswimmers.

7 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (11)

• Artificial Brownian motors: Controlling transport on the nanoscale
• When are active Brownian particles and run-and-tumble particles equivalent? Consequences for motility-induced phase separation
• Statistical Mechanics of Active Ornstein Uhlenbeck Particles
• Pulling and Pushing a Cargo With a Catalytically Active Carrier
• Run-and-tumble motion: field theory and entropy production
• Chemotaxis of artificial microswimmers in active density waves
• The Parental Active Model: a unifying stochastic description of self-propulsion
• Self-Polarizing Microswimmers in Active Density Waves
• Chemotaxis of cargo-carrying self-propelled particles
• Dynamics of active particles with space-dependent swim velocity
• Energetics of critical oscillators in active bacterial baths

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Field-Theory of Active Chiral Hard Disks: A First-Principles Approach to Steric Interactions
• Transport of molecules via polymerization in chemical gradients
• Statistics of carrier-cargo complexes
• Active Transport of Cargo-Carrying and Interconnected Chiral Particles
• A Hitchhiker's Guide To Active Motion
• Riding the Wave: Polymers in Time-dependent Nonequilibrium Baths