ORCID ID

Ryan, Shawn/0000-0003-2468-1827

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-1-2013

Publication Title

New Journal of Physics

Abstract

The study of collective motion in bacterial suspensions has been of significant recent interest. To better understand the non-trivial spatio-temporal correlations emerging in the course of collective swimming in suspensions of motile bacteria, a simple model is employed: a bacterium is represented as a force dipole with size, through the use of a short-range repelling potential, and shape. The model emphasizes two fundamental mechanisms: dipolar hydrodynamic interactions and short-range bacterial collisions. Using direct particle simulations validated by a dedicated experiment, we show that changing the swimming speed or concentration alters the time scale of sustained collective motion, consistent with experiment. Also, the correlation length in the collective state is almost constant as concentration and swimming speed change even though increasing each greatly increases the input of energy to the system. We demonstrate that the particle shape is critical for the onset of collective effects. In addition, new experimental results are presented illustrating the onset of collective motion with an ultrasound technique. This work exemplifies the delicate balance between various physical mechanisms governing collective motion in bacterial suspensions and provides important insights into its mesoscopic nature.

Comments

AS and ISA were supported by the US DOE BES, Division of Materials Science and Engineering, under contract no. DE AC02-06CH11357 (simulations), and ISA was supported by the NIH grant 1R01GM104978-01 (modeling/experiment). The work of LB was supported by the NIH grant 1R01GM104978-01. The work of SDR was supported by the DOE grant DE-FG02-08ER25862.

DOI

10.1088/1367-2630/15/10/105021

Version

Publisher's PDF

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Volume

15

Included in

Mathematics Commons

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