Bulletin of the American Physical Society
2023 APS March Meeting
Volume 68, Number 3
Las Vegas, Nevada (March 5-10)
Virtual (March 20-22); Time Zone: Pacific Time
Session D18: Fluids III
3:00 PM–6:00 PM,
Monday, March 6, 2023
Room: Room 210
Sponsoring
Unit:
DFD
Chair: Thomas Sykes, University of Oxford
Abstract: D18.00012 : Power-law intermittency in the active motion of colloidal swimmers*
5:12 PM–5:24 PM
Presenter:
Peter Schall
(University of Amsterdam)
Authors:
Peter Schall
(University of Amsterdam)
Daniela J Kraft
(Leiden University)
Stefania Ketzetzi
(ETH Zurich)
Nick Oikonomeas-Koppasis
(University of Amsterdam)
Here, by studying in detail the time-dependent propagation of colloidal swimmers, we find remarkable power-law intermittency of the swimming velocity magnitude. This intermittency is robust across different swimmer types, and appears to be a generic property of the swimming mechanism itself. We model the swimmer motion by an interplay of active force, set by the chemical or fuel gradient, and hydrodynamic drag, set by the wetting properties of the substrate, which we assume to fluctuate due to surface heterogeneities and fluctuations in the particle's height above the substrate. We show that the model describes the power-law velocity distributions very well, allowing insight into the underlying mechanism. The generic feature behind the power-law distributions is highlighted by the collapse of all colloidal swimmer data in a single master curve. These results suggest that many more swimmers, whose active motion is driven by chemical or nutrient gradients near a wall, both synthetic and biological, exhibit similar robust intermittent motion, governed by the same fundamental principles.
*We thank the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for funding through grant 680.PR.050.
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