Microswimmers in Patterned Environments

TL;DR

This paper explores how microswimmers navigate complex environments with obstacles, revealing their potential for advanced sorting and classification in biomedical and lab-on-a-chip applications.

Contribution

It provides experimental and simulation evidence of microswimmers' ability to navigate patterned environments and demonstrates their potential for sorting based on swimming style.

Findings

Microswimmers can steer perpendicularly to an applied force in obstacle-laden environments.

Navigation behavior is highly sensitive to swimming style details.

Potential applications include sorting, classification, and dialysis techniques.

Abstract

We demonstrate with experiments and simulations how microscopic self-propelled particles navigate through environments presenting complex spatial features, which mimic the conditions inside cells, living organisms and future lab-on-a-chip devices. In particular, we show that, in the presence of periodic obstacles, microswimmers can steer even perpendicularly to an applied force. Since such behaviour is very sensitive to the details of their specific swimming style, it can be employed to develop advanced sorting, classification and dialysis techniques.