TY - JOUR
T1 - State diagram of a three-sphere microswimmer in a channel
AU - Daddi-Moussa-Ider, Abdallah
AU - Lisicki, Maciej
AU - Mathijssen, Arnold J.T.M.
AU - Hoell, Christian
AU - Goh, Segun
AU - Bławzdziewicz, Jerzy
AU - Menzel, Andreas M.
AU - Löwen, Hartmut
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) through the projects LO 418/17-2, ME 3571/2-2, and DA 2107/1-1. This work has been supported by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Poland via the Mobility Plus Fellowship awarded to ML. ML acknowledges funding from the Foundation for Polish Science within the START programme. The work of AJTMM was supported by a cross-disciplinary fellowship from the Human Frontier Science Program Organization (HFSPO - LT001670/2017). SG gratefully acknowledges funding from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. JB would like to acknowledge financial support from NSF Grant CBET 1603627. This article is based upon work from COST Action MP1305, supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 IOP Publishing Ltd.
PY - 2018/6/1
Y1 - 2018/6/1
N2 - Geometric confinements are frequently encountered in soft matter systems and in particular significantly alter the dynamics of swimming microorganisms in viscous media. Surface-related effects on the motility of microswimmers can lead to important consequences in a large number of biological systems, such as biofilm formation, bacterial adhesion and microbial activity. On the basis of low-Reynolds-number hydrodynamics, we explore the state diagram of a three-sphere microswimmer under channel confinement in a slit geometry and fully characterize the swimming behavior and trajectories for neutral swimmers, puller- and pusher-type swimmers. While pushers always end up trapped at the channel walls, neutral swimmers and pullers may further perform a gliding motion and maintain a stable navigation along the channel. We find that the resulting dynamical system exhibits a supercritical pitchfork bifurcation in which swimming in the mid-plane becomes unstable beyond a transition channel height while two new stable limit cycles or fixed points that are symmetrically disposed with respect to the channel mid-height emerge. Additionally, we show that an accurate description of the averaged swimming velocity and rotation rate in a channel can be captured analytically using the method of hydrodynamic images, provided that the swimmer size is much smaller than the channel height.
AB - Geometric confinements are frequently encountered in soft matter systems and in particular significantly alter the dynamics of swimming microorganisms in viscous media. Surface-related effects on the motility of microswimmers can lead to important consequences in a large number of biological systems, such as biofilm formation, bacterial adhesion and microbial activity. On the basis of low-Reynolds-number hydrodynamics, we explore the state diagram of a three-sphere microswimmer under channel confinement in a slit geometry and fully characterize the swimming behavior and trajectories for neutral swimmers, puller- and pusher-type swimmers. While pushers always end up trapped at the channel walls, neutral swimmers and pullers may further perform a gliding motion and maintain a stable navigation along the channel. We find that the resulting dynamical system exhibits a supercritical pitchfork bifurcation in which swimming in the mid-plane becomes unstable beyond a transition channel height while two new stable limit cycles or fixed points that are symmetrically disposed with respect to the channel mid-height emerge. Additionally, we show that an accurate description of the averaged swimming velocity and rotation rate in a channel can be captured analytically using the method of hydrodynamic images, provided that the swimmer size is much smaller than the channel height.
KW - biological fluid dynamics
KW - low-Reynolds-number hydrodynamics
KW - microswimmer
KW - swimming
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85048275856&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1088/1361-648X/aac470
DO - 10.1088/1361-648X/aac470
M3 - Article
C2 - 29757157
AN - SCOPUS:85048275856
VL - 30
JO - Journal of Physics Condensed Matter
JF - Journal of Physics Condensed Matter
SN - 0953-8984
IS - 25
M1 - 254004
ER -