BPCPPDYSOE21 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 24: Poster B: Active Biological Matter, Cell Mechanics, Systems Biology, Computational Biophysics, etc.
BP 24.6: Poster
Tuesday, March 23, 2021, 16:00–18:30, BPp
Motion of Magnetic Microswimmers in Complex Environments — •Konrad Marx1, Vitali Telezki1, Omar Muñoz1, Agnese Codutti2, Damien Faivre2,3, and Stefan Klumpp1,2 — 1Institute for the Dynamics of Complex Systems, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany — 2Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Potsdam, Germany — 3Aix Marseille Université, CNRS, CEA, BIAM, Saint Paul lez Durance, France
We study magnetic microswimmers that tend to align their active motion with the direction of a magnetic field. A biological example are magnetotactic bacteria, which use this effect to navigate towards favorable oxygen conditions. Their natural environment is sediment at the bottom of lakes. Motivated by this, we study a computational model for how magnetic microswimmers attempt to cross a channel of circular obstacles. Our model accounts for diffusion, interaction with the obstacles and the walls, and for a magnetic field acting along the channel. We generate obstacle configurations from experimental data on size distribution of sand grains. We find that obstacles can play a decisive role for the trajectories of the microswimmers and their chance to cross the channel. Specifically, we identify regions that necessitate backwards swimming (“traps”) as a dominant factor and investigate which geometrical parameters of the obstacle configurations determine the arrival rates of the swimmers at the end of the channel.