Hydrodynamic description of the long-time tails of the linear and rotational velocity autocorrelation functions of a particle in a confined geometry

Abstract

We report a hydrodynamic analysis of the long-time behavior of the linear and angular velocity autocorrelation functions of an isolated colloid particle constrained to have quasi-two-dimensional motion, and compare the predicted behavior with the results of lattice-Boltzmann simulations. Our analysis uses the singularity method to characterize unsteady linear motion of an incompressible fluid. For bounded fluids we construct an image system with a discrete set of fundamental solutions of the Stokes equation from which we extract the long-time decay of the velocity. For the case that there are free slip boundary conditions at walls separated by H particle diameters, the time evolution of the parallel linear velocity and the perpendicular rotational velocity following impulsive excitation both correspond to the time evolution of a two-dimensional (2D) fluid with effective density rho_(2D)=rhoH. For the case that there are no slip boundary conditions at the walls, the same types of motion correspond to 2D fluid motions with a coefficient of friction xi=pi(2)nu/H(2) modulo a prefactor of order 1, with nu the kinematic viscosity. The linear particle motion perpendicular to the walls also experiences an effective frictional force, but the time dependence is proportional to t(-2) , which cannot be related to either pure 3D or pure 2D fluid motion. Our incompressible fluid model predicts correct self-diffusion constants but it does not capture all of the effects of the fluid confinement on the particle motion. In particular, the linear motion of a particle perpendicular to the walls is influenced by coupling between the density flux and the velocity field, which leads to damped velocity oscillations whose frequency is proportional to c_(s)/H , with c_(s) the velocity of sound. For particle motion parallel to no slip walls there is a slowing down of a density flux that spreads diffusively, which generates a long-time decay proportional to t(-1) .