title: Collective beating of artificial microcilia.
abstract: We combine technical, experimental, and theoretical efforts to investigate the collective dynamics of artificial microcilia in a viscous fluid. We take advantage of soft lithography and colloidal self-assembly to devise microcarpets made of hundreds of slender magnetic rods. This novel experimental setup is used to investigate the dynamics of extended cilia arrays driven by a precessing magnetic field. Whereas the dynamics of an isolated cilium is a rigid body rotation, collective beating results in a symmetry breaking of the precession patterns. The trajectories of the cilia are anisotropic and experience a significant structural evolution as the actuation frequency increases. We present a minimal model to account for our experimental findings and demonstrate how the global geometry of the array imposes the shape of the trajectories via long-range hydrodynamic interactions.
authors.affiliation: PMMH ESPCI-ParisTech-CNRS UMR-Universit Paris, France.
authors.forename: Naïs
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Coq
authors.forename: Antoine
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bricard
authors.forename: Francois-Damien
authors.initials: FD
authors.lastname: Delapierre
authors.forename: Laurent
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Malaquin
authors.forename: Olivia
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: du Roure
authors.forename: Marc
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Fermigier
authors.forename: Denis
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Bartolo
mesh_terms: D002923:Cilia / Q000502:physiology*; D003102:Colloids; D060526:Magnetic Fields; D008954:Models, Biological; D014783:Viscosity
chemical_list: D003102:Colloids