title: Swim pressure on walls with curves and corners.
abstract: The concept of swim pressure quantifies the average force exerted by microswimmers on confining walls in nonequilibrium. Here we explore how the swim pressure depends on the wall curvature and on the presence of sharp corners in the wall. For active Brownian particles at high dilution, we present a coherent framework which describes the force and torque on passive particles of arbitrary shape, in the limit of large particles compared to the persistence length of the swimmer trajectories. The resulting forces can be used to derive, for example, the activity-induced depletion interaction between two disks, as well as to optimize the shape of a tracer particle for high swimming velocity. Our predictions are verifiable in experiments on passive obstacles exposed to a bath of bacteria or artificial microswimmers.
authors.affiliation: Institut für Theoretische Physik II: Weiche Materie, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Universitätsstraße 1, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany.
authors.forename: Frank
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Smallenburg
authors.affiliation: Institut für Theoretische Physik II: Weiche Materie, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Universitätsstraße 1, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany.
authors.forename: Hartmut
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Löwen
mesh_terms: D018407:Bacterial Physiological Phenomena; D003198:Computer Simulation; D057446:Hydrodynamics; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009038:Motion; D011312:Pressure; D013550:Swimming