Circling particles and drafting in optical vortices

We model a system of particles suspended in a viscous fluid circle in optical vortices generated by holographic optical tweezer techniques (Curtis and Grier 2003 Phys. Rev. Lett. 90 133901) and show that hydrodynamic interactions between the circling particles determine their collective motion. We perform a linear-stability analysis to investigate the stability of regular particle clusters and illustrate the limit cycle to which the unstable modes converge. We clarify that drafting of particle doublets is essential for the understanding of the limit cycle.