Phenomenological modeling of the motility of self-propelled microorganisms
Biological Physics
2014-07-08 v1
Abstract
The motility of microorganisms in liquid media is an important issue in active matter and it is not yet fully understood. Previous theoretical approaches dealing with the microscopic description of microbial movement have modeled the propelling force exerted by the organism as a Gaussian white noise term in the equation of motion. We present experimental results for ciliates of the genus Colpidium, which do not agree with the Gaussian white noise hypothesis. We propose a new stochastic model that goes beyond such assumption and displays good agreement with the experimental statistics of motion, such as velocity distribution and velocity autocorrelation.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1407.1762,
title = {Phenomenological modeling of the motility of self-propelled microorganisms},
author = {Silvia Zaoli and Andrea Giometto and Marco Formentin and Sandro Azaele and Andrea Rinaldo and Amos Maritan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.1762},
year = {2014}
}