Toward a complete description of nucleation and growth in liquid-liquid phase separation

TL;DR

This paper investigates the stages of nucleation and growth in liquid-liquid phase separation, providing experimental data on growth dynamics and crossover times, leading to a comprehensive understanding of the process.

Contribution

It offers new experimental measurements of growth exponents and crossover times, enhancing the theoretical understanding of phase separation in off-critical binary liquids.

Findings

Measured growth exponent of the intermediate regime

Determined crossover time between growth regimes

Provided a comprehensive growth scenario for off-critical phase separation

Abstract

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 nucleated droplets are a diffusion-driven free growth, an intermediate regime and a coarsening by reduction of interface (Ostwald ripening or Brownian collisions induced coalescence). We have made light attenuation experiments to investigate the sedimentation in such systems. These results have given us access experimentally to two values predicted theoretically: the growth exponent of the intermediate regime and the crossover time between this regime and interface-reduction coarsening. These data, added to the literature results, have permitted to get a quite complete view of the growth scenario in very off-critical phase-separating liquids.