Multi-fractal characterization of bacterial swimming dynamics: a case study on real and simulated .

To add to the current state of knowledge about bacterial swimming dynamics, in this paper, we study the fractal swimming dynamics of populations of bacteria both and , while accounting for realistic conditions like volume exclusion, chemical interactions, obstacles and distribution of chemoattractant in the environment. While previous research has shown that bacterial motion is non-ergodic, we demonstrate that, besides the non-ergodicity, the bacterial swimming dynamics is multi-fractal in nature. Finally, we demonstrate that the multi-fractal characteristic of bacterial dynamics is strongly affected by bacterial density and chemoattractant concentration.