https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2016-60056-4
Review
Hydrodynamic synchronization of flagellar oscillators
1 Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany
2 TU Dresden, cfaed, Dresden, Germany
a e-mail: benjamin.m.friedrich@tu-dresden.de
Received: 23 February 2016
Revised: 31 March 2016
Published online: 10 November 2016
In this review, we highlight the physics of synchronization in collections of beating cilia and flagella. We survey the nonlinear dynamics of synchronization in collections of noisy oscillators. This framework is applied to flagellar synchronization by hydrodynamic interactions. The time-reversibility of hydrodynamics at low Reynolds numbers requires swimming strokes that break time-reversal symmetry to facilitate hydrodynamic synchronization. We discuss different physical mechanisms for flagellar synchronization, which break this symmetry in different ways.
© The Author(s) 2016
Open Access This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
