Swimming fluctuations of micro-organisms due to heterogeneous microstructure.
Swimming microorganisms in biological complex fluids may be greatly influenced by heterogeneous media and microstructure with length scales comparable to the organisms. A fundamental effect of swimming in a heterogeneous rather than homogeneous medium is that variations in local environments lead to swimming velocity fluctuations. Here we examine long-range hydrodynamic contributions to these fluctuations using a Najafi-Golestanian swimmer near spherical and filamentous obstacles. We find that forces on microstructures determine changes in swimming speed. For macroscopically isotropic networks, we also show how the variance of the fluctuations in swimming speeds are related to density and orientational correlations in the medium.
Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Nevada at Reno, Reno, Nevada 89557 USA.
Mehdi
M
Jabbarzadeh
Division of Computational Sciences in Mathematics, National Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Daejeon, Republic of Korea 305-811.
YunKyong
Y
Hyon
Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Nevada at Reno, Reno, Nevada 89557 USA.
Henry C
HC
Fu
D045424:Complex Mixtures; D057446:Hydrodynamics; D008954:Models, Biological; D013550:Swimming
D045424:Complex Mixtures