Solid undeformable particles surrounded by a liquid medium or interface may propel themselves by altering their local environment. Such nonmechanical swimming is at work in autophoretic swimmers, whose selfgenerated field gradient induces a slip velocity on their surface, and in interfacial swimmers, which exploit unbalance in surface tension. In both classes of systems, swimmers with intrinsic asymmetry have received the most attention but self-propulsion is also possible for particles that are perfectly isotropic. The underlying symmetry-breaking instability has been established theoretically for autophoretic systems but has yet to be observed experimentally for solid particles. For interfacial swimmers, several experimental works point to such a mechanism, but its understanding has remained incomplete. The goal of this work is to fill this gap. Building on an earlier proposal, we first develop a point-source model that may be applied generically to interfacial or phoretic swimmers. Using this approximate but unifying picture, we show that they operate in very different regimes and obtain analytical predictions for the propulsion velocity and its dependence on swimmer size and asymmetry. Next, we present experiments on interfacial camphor disks showing that they indeed self-propel in an advection-dominated regime where intrinsic asymmetry is irrelevant and that the swimming velocity increases sublinearly with size. Finally, we discuss the merits and limitations of the point-source model in light of the experiments and point out its broader relevance.

Interfacial swimmers are objects that self-propel at an interface by autonomously generating a gradient of surface tension, often through the continuous release of a surfactant. While the case of asymmetric swimmers has long been studied, experiments have shown that spontaneous motion is also possible for symmetric swimmers. The basic mechanism of symmetry-breaking is qualitatively well-established but one key aspect of the phenomenon that has proved particularly difficult to elucidate is the role of Marangoni effects in the self-propulsion. We address this question by numerical methods, which can fully handle the complex interplay between swimmer motion, fluid flow, surfactant distribution, and Marangoni stresses. Our swimmer is a disk releasing a soluble surfactant in a deep-layer fluid. We investigate how the swimming velocity, represented by a Péclet number Pe * depends on its characteristics, as encapsulated in the Marangoni number M. We analyze the properties of the swimming diagram Pe * (M) and compare with approximate models to understand their origin. We find that the low-Pe * regime exhibits a bistability region: spontaneous swimming involves a threshold Marangoni number, a discontinuity in velocity and possibly hysteresis. Those features are present only for a full description of the problem and reveal the subtle but key role of Marangoni flows. The large-Pe * regime features a robust asymptotic scaling law Pe * ∼ M α , whose exponent α 0.72 is close to the 3/4 value predicted by a simplified model, indicating a much weaker influence of Marangoni flows. While our results were obtained assuming a point-source swimmer in the Stokes flow regime, we show that the picture remains very similar when considering a spatially extended source size, finite Reynolds number, or a fixed concentration swimmer. We discuss our findings in relation to experiments.