相关论文: Advection selects pattern in multistable emulsions…
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,…
Biomolecular condensates are complex droplets comprising diverse molecules that interact using various mechanisms. Condensation is often driven by short-ranged attraction, but net charges can also mediate long-ranged repulsion. Using…
Suspensions of spherical active particles often show microphase separation. At a continuum level, coupling their scalar density to fluid flow, there are two distinct explanations. Each involves an effective interfacial tension: the first…
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 under non-equilibrium conditions is exploited by biological cells to organize their cytoplasm but remains poorly understood as a physical phenomenon. Here, we study a ternary fluid model in which phase-separating molecules…
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…
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…
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…
When two sessile drops of the same liquid touch, they merge into one drop, driven by capillarity. However, the coalescence can be delayed, or even completely stalled for a substantial period of time, when the two drops have different…
The stability of shapes formed by three viscoelastic droplets during their arrested coalescence has been investigated using micromanipulation experiments. Addition of a third droplet to arrested droplet doublets is shown to be controlled by…
Emulsions ripen with an average droplet size increasing in time. In chemically active emulsions, coarsening can be absent, leading to a non-equilibrium steady state with mono-disperse droplet sizes. By considering a minimal model for phase…
The stability of alkane-in-water nanoemulsions during the sub-stationary regime is studied by means of Emulsion Stability Simulations (ESS). The effects of Ostwald ripening, flocculation, coalescence, gravity, and hydration forc- es are…
Active emulsions and liquid crystalline shells are intriguing and experimentally realisable types of topological matter. Here we numerically study the morphology and spatiotemporal dynamics of a double emulsion, where one or two passive…
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…
Drop coalescence is central to diverse processes involving dispersions of drops in industrial, engineering and scientific realms. During coalescence, two drops first touch and then merge as the liquid neck connecting them grows from…
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…
Noneqiuilibrium dynamics of rotating droplets are studied by molecular dynamics simulations. Small deviations from the theoretical prediction are observed when the size of a droplet is small, and the deviations become smaller as the size of…
We use x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy to investigate the dynamics of a high volume fraction emulsion creaming under gravity. The dodecane-in-water emulsion has interfaces stabilized solely by colloidal particles (silica). The samples…