Dresden 2026 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 1: Active Matter I (joint session BP/CPP/DY)

BP 1.7: Hauptvortrag

Montag, 9. März 2026, 11:15–11:45, BAR/SCHÖ

Modeling and inference of magnetotactic motility in complex environments — •Stefan Klumpp — Institute for the Dynamics of Complex Systems, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

Magnetotactic bacteria orient themselves and swim along field lines of the geomagnetic field. Their magnetically directed self-propelled motion makes them an instance of dipolar active matter. Here we focus on the interaction of these bacteria with walls or obstacles. Experiments in microfluidic systems show that interactions with walls result in (possibly transient) alignment parallel to the wall, which may compete with the alignment with the magnetic field. The dynamic behavior arising from the competition of the two alignments includes U-turn trajectories in circular chambers and trapping and escape dynamics in channels with overlapping cylindrical obstacles. In a phenomenological picture, the resulting motion can be described in an Active Brownian Particle model by introducing a wall torque that competes with the magnetic torque, which results in good agreement with experimental observations. Systematic Bayesian inference of the wall torque from observations shows that only a part of the torque function (dependence on incident angle) can be learned reliably from the data.

Keywords: magnetotaxis; active Brownian particles; Bayesian inference; bacterial motility