Related papers: Droplet Ripening in Concentration Gradients
Liquid-liquid phase separation is an important mechanism for compartmentalizing the cell's cytoplasm, allowing the dynamic organization of the components necessary for survival. However, it is not clear how phase separation is affected by…
Droplet formation has emerged as an essential concept for the spatiotemporal organisation of biomolecules in cells. However, classical descriptions of droplet dynamics based on passive liquid-liquid phase separation cannot capture the…
It has been proposed that during the early steps in the origin of life, small droplets could have formed via the segregation of molecules from complex mixtures by phase separation. These droplets could have provided chemical reaction…
Concentration gradients play a critical role in embryogenesis, bacterial locomotion, as well as the motility of active particles. Particles develop concentration profiles around them by dissolution, adsorption, or the reactivity of surface…
Droplets are essential for spatially controlling biomolecules in cells. To work properly, cells need to control the emergence and morphology of droplets. On the one hand, driven chemical reactions can affect droplets profoundly. For…
Absence of Ostwald ripening has been observed in living cells, which operate out of equilibrium. Using molecular dynamics we study the behaviour of liquid droplets away from equilibrium in a system of particles interacting with each other…
We study the time evolution of a sessile liquid droplet, which is initially put onto a solid surface in a non-equilibrium configuration and then evolves towards its equilibrium shape. We adapt here the standard approach to the dynamics of…
In both biological and artificial systems, concentration gradients can serve as a convenient mechanism for manipulating particles and generating motility. Particles that interact with a solute will move along its gradient; if they…
We propose coupled evolution equations for the thickness of a liquid film and the density of an adsorbate layer on a partially wetting solid substrate. Therein, running droplets are studied assuming a chemical reaction underneath the…
Chemically active droplets provide simple models for cell-like systems that can grow and divide. Such active droplet systems are driven away from thermodynamic equilibrium and turn over chemically, which corresponds to a simple metabolism.…
Phase separation in passive systems leads to uncontrolled droplet growth, limiting structural control in soft materials and cells. We identify a generic mechanism to arrest coarsening based on chemical interconversion between molecular…
Biological cells use droplets to separate components and spatially control their interior. Experiments demonstrate that the complex, crowded cellular environment affects the droplet arrangement and their sizes. To understand this behavior,…
Here, we study the coalescence of two droplets that are moving in the same direction on a soft surface; the motion of the droplets is caused by a gradient in the surface stiffness. As reference, stationary coalescence of the same droplets…
This study employs molecular dynamics simulations to investigate droplet dynamics when a stationary droplet on a solid surface is struck by another droplet of similar size from above. The focus is on the jumping behavior of the merged…
We numerically study the coalescence dynamics of two sessile droplets with radii $R_0$. The droplets are placed on top of a rigid substrate with a contact angle of $\theta_{eq.} = \pi/9$. Having a highly wettable substrate ($\theta_{eq} \ll…
Biomolecules, such as proteins and RNAs, can phase separate in the cytoplasm of cells to form biomolecular condensates. Such condensates are liquid-like droplets that can wet biological surfaces such as membranes. Many molecules that…
Results for the kinetics of vapor-liquid transitions, following temperature quenches with different densities, are presented from the molecular dynamics simulations of a Lennard-Jones system. For critical density, bicontinuous liquid and…
Droplet deformations caused by substrate vibrations are ubiquitous in nature and highly relevant for applications such as microreactors and single-cell sorting. The vibrations can induce droplet oscillations, a fundamental process that…
We study theoretically the self-propulsion dynamics of a small droplet on general curved surfaces by a variational approach. A new reduced model is derived based on careful computations for the capillary energy and the viscous dissipation…
The phase separation mechanism of a binary liquid mixture off-critically quenched in its miscibility gap is nucleation and growth, its homogeneous phase reaching a metastable equilibrium state. The successive stages of growth of the…