Andreas Zöttl (Vienna): Hydrodynamics of microscopic active and driven particles in complex environments

The non-equilibrium transport of microscopic colloidal particles and biological cells in viscous environments is often determined by hydrodynamic flows. These flows can either be applied externally, such as microfluidic Poiseuille flow, or created by the particles themselves, as for sedimenting colloids or swimming microorganisms. While good understanding of the dynamics of mirror-symmetric particles in simple environments exists, the biologically and biotechnologically relevant nontrivial interplay of particle shape, chirality,  activity and hydrodynamic flows in complex environments is a challenging task and an active field of research in soft matter physics and biological physics.
I am using theoretical and computational methods to extract physical principles of active and driven microscopic particle transport, and to explain recent experimental results. In this talk I will give a cross-section of some of our recent work, including techniques and results, such as (i) coarse-grained modeling of polymer-microswimmer interactions, (ii) theoretical modeling of chiral particle dynamics in flows,  (iii) reinforcement learning of chemotactic microswimmers, and (iv) Brownian dynamics of elongated particles in shear flows.