Related papers: Accelerated Ostwald ripening by chemical activity
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…
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.…
Living cells use phase separation and concentration gradients to organize chemical compartments in space. Here, we present a theoretical study of droplet dynamics in gradient systems. We derive the corresponding growth law of droplets and…
Cells operate in part by compartmentalizing chemical reactions. For example, recent work has shown that chromatin, the material that contains the cell's genome, can auto-regulate its structure by utilizing reaction products (proteins, RNA)…
The interaction of phase-separating systems with chemical reactions is of great interest in various contexts, from biology to material science. In biology, phase separation is thought to be the driving force behind the formation of…
We revisit motility-induced phase separation in two models of active particles interacting by pairwise repulsion. We show that the resulting dense phase contains gas bubbles distributed algebraically up to a typically large cutoff scale. At…
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…
Applicability of classical Lifshitz-Slyozov theory of Ostwald ripening is analyzed and found limited by relatively large cluster sizes due to restrictions imposed by theoretical assumptions. An assumption about the steady state ripening…
Biomolecular condensates self-assemble when proteins and nucleic acids spontaneously demix to form droplets within the crowded intracellular milieu. This simple mechanism underlies the formation of a wide variety of membraneless…
Partially miscible bubble populations trapped in porous media are ubiquitous in subsurface applications such as underground hydrogen storage (UHS), where cyclic injections fragment gas into numerous bubbles with distributions of sizes and…
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…
We investigate the kinetics of bubble coarsening in a single component Lennard-Jones fluid using large-scale molecular dynamics simulations. A homogeneous high-temperature system is quenched below the critical temperature to induce the…
The phenomenon of Ostwald Ripening is generally considered a limiting factor in the monodisperse production of nanoparticles. However, by analysing the free energy of a binary AB solution with precipitated A particles we show that there is…
We present some experimental and simulation results that reproduces the Ostwald ripening (gas diffusion among bubbles) for air bubbles in a liquid fluid. Concerning the experiment, there it is measured the time evolution of bubbles mean…
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…
We investigate the mechanism of growth of nanocrystals from solution using the case of ZnO. Spanning a wide range of values of the parameters, such as the temperature and the reactant concentration, that control the growth, our results…
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,…
Cells control the size and organization of biomolecular condensates formed by liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS), but multiple mechanisms likely contribute to this control and remain to be fully elucidated. Here we propose a…
Ostwald ripening is a well-known physicochemical phenomenon in which smaller particles, characterized by high surface energy, dissolve and feed the bigger ones that are thermodynamically more stable. The effect is commonly observed in solid…
One of the hypothesized functions of biomolecular condensates is to act as chemical reactors, where chemical reactions can be modulated, i.e. accelerated or slowed down, while substrate molecules enter and products exit from the condensate.…