Self-starting micromotors in a bacterial bath.

Micromotors pushed by biological entities, such as motile bacteria, constitute a fascinating way to convert chemical energy into mechanical work at the micrometer scale. Here we show, by using numerical simulations, that a properly designed asymmetric object can be spontaneously set into the desired motion when immersed in a chaotic bacterial bath. Our findings open the way to conceive new hybrid microdevices exploiting the mechanical power production of bacterial organisms. Moreover, the system provides an example of how, in contrast with equilibrium thermal baths, the irreversible chaotic motion of active particles can be rectified by asymmetric environments.

• Publication year

  2008

• Venue

  Physical Review Letters

• Publication date

  2008-12-12

• Fields of study

  Materials Science, Physics, Medicine, Engineering

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1103/PhysRevLett.102.048104arXiv 0812.2375PMID 19257480
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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