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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 2: Active Matter I (joint session BP/CPP/DY)

DY 2.9: Talk

Monday, March 18, 2024, 11:45–12:00, H 1028

Optimal motility strategies for self-propelled agents to explore porous media — •Christoph Lohrmann and Christian Holm — Institute for Computational Physics, University of Stuttgart, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany

Micro-robots for, e.g., biomedical applications, need to be equipped with motility strategies that enable them to navigate through complex environments. Inspired by biological microorganisms we recreate motility patterns such as run-and-reverse, run-and-tumble or run-reverse-flick applied to active rod-like particles in silico. We investigate their capability to efficiently explore disordered porous environments with various porosities and mean pore sizes ranging down to the scale of the active particle. By calculating the effective diffusivity for the different patterns, we can predict the optimal one for each porous sample geometry. We find that providing the agent with the ability to sense position for a certain time and to make a decision based on its observation yields a motility pattern outperforming the biologically inspired patterns for all investigated porous samples[1].

[1] Lohrmann, Holm: Optimal motility strategies for self-propelled agents to explore porous media, arXiv:2302.06709, 2023

Keywords: porous media; bacteria; run and tumble; active brownian particle