https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/s10189-022-00183-5
Regular Article - Living Systems
Gyrotactic cluster formation of bottom-heavy squirmers
Institut für Theoretische Physik, Technische Universität Berlin, Hardenbergstr. 36, D-10623, Berlin, Germany
Received:
4
January
2022
Accepted:
7
March
2022
Published online:
18
March
2022
Squirmers that are bottom-heavy experience a torque that aligns them along the vertical so that they swim upwards. In a suspension of many squirmers, they also interact hydrodynamically via flow fields that are initiated by their swimming motion and by gravity. Swimming under the combined action of flow field vorticity and gravitational torque is called gyrotaxis. Using the method of multi-particle collision dynamics, we perform hydrodynamic simulations of a many-squirmer system floating above the bottom surface. Due to gyrotaxis they exhibit pronounced cluster formation with increasing gravitational torque. The clusters are more volatile at low values but compactify to smaller clusters at larger torques. The mean distance between clusters is mainly controlled by the gravitational torque and not the global density. Furthermore, we observe that neutral squirmers form clusters more easily, whereas pullers require larger gravitational torques due to their additional force-dipole flow fields. We do not observe clustering for pusher squirmers. Adding a rotlet dipole to the squirmer flow field induces swirling clusters. At high gravitational strengths, the hydrodynamic interactions with the no-slip boundary create an additional vertical alignment for neutral squirmers, which also supports cluster formation.
© The Author(s) 2022
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
