Controlled Propulsion of Two-Dimensional Microswimmers in a Precessing Magnetic Field

Magnetically actuated micro-/nanoswimmers can potentially be used in noninvasive biomedical applications, such as targeted drug delivery and micromanipulation. Herein, two-dimensional (2D) rigid ferromagnetic microstructures are shown to be capable of propelling themselves in three dimensions at low Reynolds numbers in a precessing field. Importantly, the above propulsion relies neither on soft structure deformation nor on the geometrical chirality of swimmers, but is rather driven by the dynamic chirality generated by field precession, which allows an almost unconstrained choice of materials and fabrication methods. Therefore, the swimming performance is systematically investigated as a function of precession angle and geometric design. One disadvantage of the described propulsion method is that the fabricated 2D swimmers are achiral, which means that the forward/backward swimming direction cannot be controlled. However, it has been found that asymmetric 2D swimmers always propel themselves toward their longer arm, which implies that dynamic chirality can be constrained to be either right-handed or left-handed by permanent magnetization. Thus, the simplicity of fabrication and possibility of dynamic chirality control make the developed method ideal for applications and fundamental studies that require a large number of swimmers.