Distribution of particle displacements due to swimming microorganisms.

The experiments of Leptos et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 198103 (2009)] show that the displacements of small particles affected by swimming microorganisms achieve a non-Gaussian distribution, which nevertheless scales diffusively--the "diffusive scaling." We use a simple model where the particles undergo repeated "kicks" due to the swimmers to explain the shape of the distribution as a function of the volume fraction of swimmers. The net displacement is determined by the inverse Fourier transform of a single-swimmer characteristic function. The only adjustable parameter is the strength of the stresslet term in our spherical squirmer model. We give a criterion for convergence to a Gaussian distribution in terms of moments of the drift function and show that the experimentally observed diffusive scaling is a transient related to the slow crossover of the fourth moment from a ballistic to a linear regime with path length. We also present a simple model, with logarithmic drift function, that can be solved analytically.