Navigation strategies for active droplets in confinement

Active emulsions, i.e. self-propelling droplets in aqueous environments, provide a versatile, entirely fluid-based model system to investigate microswimmer dynamics and derive design principles for synthetic biology or smart materials. Remarkably, their propulsion relies on very general principles of symmetry breaking in nonlinear fluid dynamics and is ab initio fully autonomous and unbiased. However, one can control their motility, mirroring bioswimmer strategies like chemotaxis, rheotaxis, electrotaxis and magnetotaxis, by applying concepts from chemo- and electrohydrodynamics and nematic elasticity. In this talk I will present an overview of these strategies and the role of microfluidic confinement in their application.