Study of anisotropic particles in active bath
Author
Mehmood, Naveed
Advisor
Volpe, Giovanni
Date
2015Publisher
Bilkent University
Language
English
Type
ThesisItem Usage Stats
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Abstract
Brownian (passive) particles undergo random motion due to thermal agitation
in the surrounding medium. In recent years, a lot of attention has been devoted
to study active Brownian particles, i.e., microscopic particles capable of selfpropelling.
Unlike simple passive particles, active particles feature an interplay
between random fluctuations and active swimming. Thus, active particles are out
of thermal equilibrium and, therefore, they explore their environment completely
different from passive particles. Bacteria and other microorganisms are natural
examples of active particles that take up energy from their environment and
convert into directed (run) motion. Recently, there has been a lot of research
progress in the realization of artificial active particles (microswimmers) due to
their potential technological applications. We report the anomalous diffusion of
anisotropic particles propelled by biological microswimmers (E. Coli Bacteria).
The anisotropic particles of various shapes (L-shape, U-shape, cross-shape, Starshape
and Z-shape) were fabricated using soft lithography method. We study
the motion (translation and rotation) of various anisotropic shaped particles in
the thermal and active bath. The results are compared with isotropic (spherical)
particles. We observe that shape anisotropy in particle plays a vital role when
they are suspended in the bath of E-Coli cells showing different diffusion behavior
as the swimming pressure of E-Coli bacteria differs in the shape anisotropy.