Tales of Tails: Elastohydrodynamics of Microscale Motion

A look into the microworld reveals plethora of swimming microorganisms, which display a rich variety of shapes and swimming gaits. Despite this diversity, physics of microscale imposes universal limitations on their propulsion strategies. In his talk, Maciej Lisicki reviewed the basic properties of Stokes flows and their consequences on swimming. Next, he showed an artificial system of microscale oil droplets that have the ability to swim due to a surface phase transition driven by environmental temperature fluctuations. He demonstrated how a coarse-grained elastohydrodynamic model can be successfully employed to quantitatively describe the motion of droplets. He also showed a couple of other examples where a simplified elastohydrodynamic model proves useful for the prediction of diffusive properties.