Journal
JOURNAL OF PHYSICS-CONDENSED MATTER
Volume 30, Issue 25, Pages -Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/1361-648X/aac470
Keywords
microswimmer; biological fluid dynamics; low-Reynolds-number hydrodynamics; swimming
Categories
Funding
- DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) [LO 418/17-2, ME 3571/2-2, DA 2107/1-1]
- Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Poland
- Foundation for Polish Science within the START programme
- Human Frontier Science Program Organization [HFSPO - LT001670/2017]
- Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
- NSF [CBET 1603627]
- COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) [MP1305]
- Directorate For Engineering
- Div Of Chem, Bioeng, Env, & Transp Sys [1603627] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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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.
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