Synchronization of driven oscillators is a key aspect of flow generation in artificial and
biological filaments such as cilia. Previous theoretical and numerical studies have
considered the “rotor” model of a cilium in which the filament is coarse grained into a
colloidal sphere driven with a given force law along a predefined trajectory to represent the
oscillating motion of the cilium. These studies pointed to the importance of two factors in the
emergence of synchronization: the modulation of the driving force around the orbit and the …

Synchronization of driven oscillators is a key in flow generation in artificial and biological
systems at the micro-scale. Flow can be driven efficiently by filaments undergoing periodic
motion. These filaments are typically colloidal-scale and semi-flexible, and thus have many
conformational degrees of freedom and are subject to thermal noise; in the case of
biological cilia, they are driven in a complex fashion by internal molecular motors that induce
bending. The question of synchronization is thus best addressed by simpler systems, such …