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State diagram of a three-sphere microswimmer in a channel

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of physics. Condensed matter 2018-06, Vol.30 (25), p.254004-254004
Main Authors: Daddi-Moussa-Ider, Abdallah, Lisicki, Maciej, Mathijssen, Arnold J T M, Hoell, Christian, Goh, Segun, B awzdziewicz, Jerzy, Menzel, Andreas M, Löwen, Hartmut
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0953-8984
1361-648X
DOI:10.1088/1361-648X/aac470