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Motile and driven particles confined in microfluidic channels exhibitinteresting emergent behavior from propagating density bands to density shockwaves. A deeper understanding of the physical mechanisms responsible for theseemergent structures is relevant to a number of physical and biomedicalapplications. Here, we study the formation of density shock waves in thecontext of an idealized model of microswimmers confined in a narrow channel andsubject to a uniform external flow. Interestingly, these density shock wavesexhibit a transition from `subsonic' with compression at the back to`supersonic' with compression at the front of the population as the intensityof the external flow increases. This behavior is the result of a non-trivialinterplay between hydrodynamic interactions and geometric confinement, and isconfirmed by a novel quasilinear wave model that properly captures thedependence of the shock formation on the external flow. These findings can beused to guide the development of novel mechanisms for controlling the emergentdensity distribution and average population speed, with potentially profoundimplications on various processes in industry and biotechnology such as thetransport and sorting of cells in flow channels.

Density shock waves in confined microswimmers