Self-Assembled Magnetic Surface
Microswimmers
Professor Igor Aronson
Argonne National Laboratory
Self-propulsion of living microorganisms is a fascinating
phenomenon attracting enormous attention in the scientific community. A
new type of self-assembled micro-swimmers, "magnetic snakes", is an
excellent tool to model locomotion in a simple table-top experiment.
The snakes self-assemble from a dispersion of magnetic microparticles
suspended on the liquid-air interface and subjected to an alternating
magnetic field. The snakes often exhibit “life-like
behavior”. Formation and dynamics of these swimmers is captured
in the framework of theoretical model coupling paradigm equation for
the amplitude of surface waves, conservation law for the density of
particles, and the Navier-Stokes equation for hydrodynamic flows. The
results of continuum modeling are supported by hybrid molecular
dynamics simulations of magnetic particles floating on a surface of
fluid.