Active suspensions of bacteria and passive objects: a model for the near field pair dynamics

Near field hydrodynamic interactions are essential to determine many important emergent behaviors observed in active suspensions, but have not been successfully modeled so far. In this work we propose an effective model capable of efficiently capturing the essence of the near field hydrodynamic interactions, validated numerically by a pedagogic model system consisting of an E. coli and a spherical tracer. The proposed model effectively captures all the details of near field hydrodynamics through only a tensorial coefficient of resistance, which is fundamentally different from, and thus cannot be replaced by, an effective interaction of conservative nature. In a critical test case that studies the scattering angle of the bacterium-tracer pair dynamics, calculations based on the proposed model reveals a region in parameter space where the bacterium is trapped by the spherical tracer, a phenomenon that is regularly observed in experiments but cannot be explained by any existing model.