Regensburg 2025 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 19: Membranes and Vesicles II

BP 19.9: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 19. März 2025, 12:00–12:15, H46

Dynamics of a microswimmer near a deformable boundary — •Sagnik Garai, Ursy Makanga, Akhil Varma, and Christina Kurzthaler — Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Nöthnitzer Straße 38, 01187 Dresden, Germany

We study the hydrodynamic interactions of swimming microorganisms with nearby deformable boundaries omnipresent in their natural habitats. The boundary, characterized by its surface tension and bending rigidity, is deformed by the disturbance flow produced by the microswimmer and thereby modifies its swimming velocities. Describing the far-field flow of the agent as a combination of a force and torque dipole, we compute small deformations of the boundary. We further use the Lorentz reciprocal theorem to obtain leading-order corrections of its swimming velocities and compute a phase diagram based on the swimmer's initial orientation and the material properties of the deformable boundary. Our results reveal that pushers can both re-orient away from the boundary, leading to overall hydroelastic repulsion, or hover near the boundary, while pullers exhibit enhanced attraction. These findings demonstrate that the complex elasto-hydrodynamic interactions can generate behaviors that are fundamentally different to swimming near planar walls.

Keywords: Microswimmer; membrane; reciprocal theorem