https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2016-60070-6
Regular Article
Microswimmers near surfaces
Theoretical Soft Matter and Biophysics, Institute of Complex Systems & Institute for Advanced Simulation, Forschungszentrum Jülich, D-52425 Jülich, Germany
a e-mail: j.elgeti@fz-juelich.de
b e-mail: g.gompper@fz-juelich.de
Received: 4 March 2016
Revised: 17 May 2016
Published online: 10 November 2016
Both, in their natural environment and in a controlled experimental setup, microswimmers regularly interact with surfaces. These surfaces provide a steric boundary, both for the swimming motion and the hydrodynamic flow pattern. These effects typically imply a strong accumulation of microswimmers near surfaces. While some generic features can be derived, details of the swimmer shape and propulsion mechanism matter, which give rise to a broad range of adhesion phenomena and have to be taken into account to predict the surface accumulation for a given swimmer. We show in this minireview how numerical simulations and analytic theory can be used to predict the accumulation statistics for different systems, with an emphasis on swimmer shape, hydrodynamics interactions, and type of noisy dynamics.
© 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.
