English

Driven Brownian coagulation of polymers

Statistical Mechanics 2015-06-04 v1

Abstract

We present an analysis of the mean-field kinetics of Brownian coagulation of droplets and polymers driven by input of monomers which aims to characterize the long time behavior of the cluster size distribution as a function of the inverse fractal dimension, aa, of the aggregates. We find that two types of long time behavior are possible. For 0a<1/20\leq a < 1/2 the size distribution reaches a stationary state with a power law distribution of cluster sizes having exponent 3/2. The amplitude of this stationary state is determined exactly as a function of aa. For 1/2<a11/2 < a \leq 1, the cluster size distribution never reaches a stationary state. Instead a bimodal distribution is formed in which a narrow population of small clusters near the monomer scale is separated by a gap (where the cluster size distribution is effectively zero) from a population of large clusters which continue to grow for all time by absorbing small clusters. The marginal case, a=1/2a=1/2, is difficult to analyze definitively, but we argue that the cluster size distribution becomes stationary and there is a logarithmic correction to the algebraic tail.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1203.3905,
  title  = {Driven Brownian coagulation of polymers},
  author = {P. L. Krapivsky and Colm Connaughton},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1203.3905},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

14 pages and 12 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T20:35:43.310Z