title: Dynamics and stability of Purcell's three-link microswimmer near a wall.
abstract: The motion of swimming microorganisms is strongly influenced by the presence of boundaries. Attraction of bacteria and sperm cells to surfaces is a well-known phenomenon which has been observed in experiments and confirmed by numerical simulations. This effect is studied in this work from a viewpoint of dynamical systems theory by analyzing a swimmer model which is a variant of the classical Purcell's three-link swimmer near an infinite plane wall. The underlying geometric structure of the swimmer's dynamics and its relation to stability are elucidated. It is found that a swimmer which breaks its fore-aft symmetry has a preferred swimming direction in which its motion is passively stable and converges to a fixed separation distance from the wall.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. izi@tx.technion.ac.il
authors.forename: Yizhar
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Or
mesh_terms: D057446:Hydrodynamics; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009038:Motion