Metric Geometry Governs Optimal Control in Driven Stokes Flows: Magnetic Driving and Beyond

Abstract

In a canonical Stokes flow geometry, the Hele-Shaw cell, we show that tunable circulations induced by Lorentz forces in a conducting fluid enable particle control. We reveal that energy-optimal control paths correspond to geodesics of an emergent Riemannian metric defined over the fluid domain, which are time-optimal under a maximum-power constraint. Subject to random boundary forcing, particle paths exhibit metric-governed anisotropic diffusion. Our geometric concepts governing optimal control, though developed explicitly for circulation-driven flows, generalize to generic driven Stokes flows and so elucidate recent observations in a three-dimensional context.