Nondecaying Hydrodynamic Interactions along Narrow Channels.


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Authors
Pagliara, Stefano 
Lister, John R 
Keyser, Ulrich F 
Abstract

Particle-particle interactions are of paramount importance in every multibody system as they determine the collective behavior and coupling strength. Many well-known interactions such as electrostatic, van der Waals, or screened Coulomb interactions, decay exponentially or with negative powers of the particle spacing r. Similarly, hydrodynamic interactions between particles undergoing Brownian motion decay as 1/r in bulk, and are assumed to decay in small channels. Such interactions are ubiquitous in biological and technological systems. Here we confine two particles undergoing Brownian motion in narrow, microfluidic channels and study their coupling through hydrodynamic interactions. Our experiments show that the hydrodynamic particle-particle interactions are distance independent in these channels. This finding is of fundamental importance for the interpretation of experiments where dense mixtures of particles or molecules diffuse through finite length, water-filled channels or pore networks.

Description
Keywords
physics.bio-ph, physics.bio-ph, cond-mat.soft, physics.flu-dyn
Journal Title
Phys Rev Lett
Conference Name
Journal ISSN
0031-9007
1079-7114
Volume Title
115
Publisher
American Physical Society (APS)
Sponsorship
European Research Council (261101)
U.F.K. was supported by an ERC starting grant (PassMembrane 261101). S.P. acknowledges funding from a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. K.M. was supported by a grant from the EPSRC. E.L. was supported by Marie Curie CIG grant from EU.