title: Brownian motion of arbitrarily shaped particles in two dimensions.
abstract: We implement microfabricated boomerang particles with unequal arm lengths as a model for nonsymmetric particles and study their Brownian motion in a quasi-two-dimensional geometry by using high-precision single-particle motion tracking. We show that because of the coupling between translation and rotation, the mean squared displacements of a single asymmetric boomerang particle exhibit a nonlinear crossover from short-time faster to long-time slower diffusion, and the mean displacements for fixed initial orientation are nonzero and saturate out at long times. The measured anisotropic diffusion coefficients versus the tracking point position indicate that there exists one unique point, i.e., the center of hydrodynamic stress (CoH), at which all coupled diffusion coefficients vanish. This implies that in contrast to motion in three dimensions where the CoH exists only for high-symmetry particles, the CoH always exists for Brownian motion in two dimensions. We develop an analytical model based on Langevin theory to explain the experimental results and show that among the six anisotropic diffusion coefficients only five are independent because the translation-translation coupling originates from the translation-rotation coupling. Finally, we classify the behavior of two-dimensional Brownian motion of arbitrarily shaped particles into four groups based on the particle shape symmetry group and discussed potential applications of the CoH in simplifying understanding of the circular motions of microswimmers.
authors.affiliation: Liquid Crystal Institute and Department of Chemical Physics, Kent State University , Kent, Ohio 44242, United States.
authors.forename: Ayan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Chakrabarty
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Konya
authors.forename: Feng
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Jonathan V
authors.initials: JV
authors.lastname: Selinger
authors.forename: Kai
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.forename: Qi-Huo
authors.initials: QH
authors.lastname: Wei
mesh_terms: D008962:Models, Theoretical; D053758:Nanoparticles; D012399:Rotation