Related papers: Unusual Coarsening During Phase Separation in Poly…
Phase separation is not only ubiquitous in diverse physical systems, but also plays an important organizational role inside biological cells. However, experimental studies of intracellular condensates (drops with condensed concentrations of…
Phase separation within polymer networks plays a central role in shaping the structure and mechanics of both synthetic materials and living cells, including the formation of biomolecular condensates within cytoskeletal networks. Previous…
Living and engineered systems rely on the stable coexistence of two interspersed liquid phases. Yet surface tension drives their complete separation. Here we show that stable droplets of uniform and tuneable size can be produced through…
We discuss a new mechanism of drop coarsening due to coalescence only, which describes the late stages of phase separation in fluids. Depending on the volume fraction of the minority phase, we identify two different regimes of growth, where…
Phase coarsening is a fundamental process of microstructure evolution in multiphase materials. A thorough understanding of its kinetics is of great significance for material processing and performance. Generally, coarsening can be divided…
We study theoretically a model system of a transient network of microemulsion droplets connected by telechelic polymers and explain recent experimental findings. Despite the absence of any specific interactions between either the droplets…
In this work, we apply phase field simulations to examine the coarsening behavior of morphologically complex two-phase microstructures in which the phases have highly dissimilar mobilities, a condition approaching that found in experimental…
Phase separation has recently emerged as an important organizational principle in the dense and heterogeneous environment within living cells. Here, we use a synthetic system to show that compressive stresses in a polymer network suppress…
We propose a coarse-grained model for polymer chains and polymer networks based on the meso-scale dynamics. The model takes the internal degrees of freedom of the constituent polymer chains into account using memory functions and colored…
The formation of coacervates through phase separation of oppositely charged polyelectrolytes (PEs) is critical for understanding biological condensates and developing responsive materials. Traditionally, coacervates are viewed as spherical…
Droplet coalescence is ubiquitous in nature and the same time key to various technologies, such as inkjet printing. Here, we report on the coalescence of polymer droplets with different chain lengths coalescing on substrates of different…
The coarsening process in a class of driven systems exhibiting striped structures is studied. The dynamics is governed by the motion of the driven interfaces between the stripes. When two interfaces meet they coalesce thus giving rise to a…
We derive reduced finite dimensional ODE models starting from one dimensional lubrication equations describing coarsening dynamics of droplets in nanometric polymer film interacting on a hydrophobically coated solid substrate in the…
Colloid-polymer mixtures may undergo either fluid-fluid phase separation or gelation. This depends on the depth of the quench (polymer concentration) and polymer-colloid size ratio. We present a real-space study of dynamics in phase…
The late-stage phase ordering, in $d=2$ dimensions, of symmetric fluid mixtures violates dynamical scaling. We show however that, even at 50/50 volume fractions, if an asymmetric droplet morphology is initially present then this sustains…
Polymerization and formation of crosslinked polymer networks are important processes in manufacturing, materials fabrication, and in the case of hydrated polymer networks, synthesis of biomedical materials, drug delivery, and tissue…
We propose here a new mechanism of droplet coarsening in phase-separating fluid mixtures. In contrast to the conventional understanding that there are no interactions between droplets in the late stage of spinodal decomposition, we…
We present results on the leveling of polymer microdroplets on thin films prepared from the same material. In particular, we explore the crossover from a droplet spreading on an infinitesimally thin film (Tanner's law regime) to that of a…
This work examines the coalescence of two unequal-size spherical liquid droplets in the inviscid regime, with an emphasis on exploring the scaling of the liquid bridge evolution. Our experiment suggests that the classical 1/2 power-law…
We propose a continuum theory of the liquid-liquid phase separation in an elastic network where phase-separated microscopic droplets rich in one fluid component can form as an interplay of fluids mixing, droplet nucleation, network…