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Updated: Mar 16, 2026

Quantitative Locomotion Study of Freely Swimming Micro-organisms Using Laser Diffraction
Published on: October 25, 2012
Modeling a spheroidal microswimmer and cooperative swimming in a narrow slit
Mario Theers1, Elmar Westphal, Gerhard Gompper
1Theoretical Soft Matter and Biophysics, Institute for Advanced Simulation and Institute of Complex Systems, Forschungszentrum Jülich, D-52425 Jülich, Germany. m.theers@fz-juelich.de g.gompper@fz-juelich.de r.winkler@fz-juelich.de.
Abstract:
We propose a hydrodynamic model for a spheroidal microswimmer with two tangential surface velocity modes. This model is analytically solvable and reduces to Lighthill's and Blake's spherical squirmer model in the limit of equal major and minor semi-axes. Furthermore, we present an implementation of such a spheroidal squirmer by means of particle-based mesoscale hydrodynamics simulations using the multiparticle collision dynamics approach. We investigate its properties as well as the scattering of two spheroidal squirmers in a slit geometry. Thereby we find a stable fixed point, where two pullers swim cooperatively forming a wedge-like conformation with a small constant angle.

