Related papers: Chemical reaction-controlled phase separated drops…

Phase separation and transitions among different molecular states are ubiquitous in living cells. Such transitions can be governed by local equilibrium thermodynamics or by active processes controlled by biological fuel. It remains largely…

Biomolecular condensates are small droplets forming spontaneously in biological cells via phase separation. They play a role in many cellular processes, but it is unclear how cells control them. Cellular regulation often relies on…

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…

Biological cells and synthetic analogues use liquid-liquid phase separation to dynamically compartmentalize their environment for various applications. In many cases, multiple droplets need to coexist, and their size needs to be controlled,…

Phase separation is the thermodynamic process that explains how droplets form in multicomponent fluids. These droplets can provide controlled compartments to localize chemical reactions, and reactions can also affect the droplets' dynamics.…

Chemical activity is known to affect phase coexistence and coarsening in liquid mixtures, most commonly through reaction-induced changes of intermolecular interactions. Here, we analyze a scenario in which chemical reactions regulate…

Mixtures of several macromolecular species can lead to the formation of higher-order structures that often display non-ideal mixing behavior. In this work, we propose a minimal model of a quaternary system which considers the formation of a…

These lecture notes describe a basic theory of chemically active droplets, which are droplets kept away from equilibrium by driven chemical reactions. The notes assume a basic familiarity with equilibrium thermodynamics of phase separation,…

Understanding how multi-component liquid mixtures undergo phase separation is central to elucidating biophysical organization in the cell. Here, combining analytical and numerical results, we characterise the dynamics of mixtures with…

Materials undergoing both phase separation and chemical reactions (defined here as all processes that change particle type or number) form an important class of non-equilibrium systems. Examples range from suspensions of self-propelled…

Controlling the size of droplets, for example in biological cells, is challenging because large droplets typically outcompete smaller droplets due to surface tension. This coarsening is generally accelerated by hydrodynamic effects, but…

In active systems, whose constituents have non-equilibrium dynamics at local level, fluid-fluid phase separation is widely observed. Examples include the formation of membraneless organelles within cells; the clustering of self-propelled…

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…

Phase separation of biomolecular condensates promotes membrane-free compartmentalization in cells. The dynamics of these biocondensates is routinely regulated by energy-consuming processes. Here, we devise a theory pinpointing how active…

Motivated by intracellular phase separation, we theoretically investigate how molecular orientation and multi-component nature affect phase behavior. We construct a minimal model for a ternary mixture composed of isotropic (I), anisotropic…

Recently it has been proposed to use colliding drops for producing advanced particles or well defined capsules, or to perform chemical reactions where the merged drops constitute a micro-reactor. For all these promising applications it is…

Here we investigate how the positions of a condensed phase can be controlled by using concentration gradients of a regulator that influences phase separation. We consider a mean field model of a ternary mixture where a concentration…

In a companion paper, we put forth a thermodynamic model for complex formation via a chemical reaction involving multiple macromolecular species, which may subsequently undergo liquid-liquid phase separation and a further transition into a…

Phase separation dynamics with an initially non-uniform concentration are studied. Critical and off-critical behavior is observed simultaneously. A mechanism for an expanding phase separated region is demonstrated and the time dependence of…