Mite Mijalkov, Giovanni Volpe
Microscopic swimmers, e.g., chemotactic bacteria and cells, are capable of directed motion by exerting a force on their environment. For anisotropic microswimmers, e.g., bacteria, spermatozoa and many artificial active colloidal particles, a torque is also present leading to a circular motion with a well-defined chirality. Here, we demonstrate with numerical simulations how the chirality of this motion couples to chiral features present in the microswimmer environment. Levogyre and dextrogyre microswimmers can be separated and selectively trapped in chiral flowers of ellipses. Patterned microchannels can be used as funnels to rectify the microswimmer motion, as sorters to separate microswimmers based on their linear and angular velocities, and as sieves to trap microswimmers with specific parameters. These phenomena can be scaled down to smaller microparticles as long as the P\'eclet number is maintained constant.
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http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.6504
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