Spiral precipitation patterns in confined chemical gardens

TL;DR

This paper investigates the formation of complex spiral and other patterns in confined chemical gardens, revealing new self-similar logarithmic spirals and demonstrating how confinement and injection control pattern morphology.

Contribution

It introduces a controlled experimental setup for chemical gardens that produces diverse patterns, including a new class of self-similar logarithmic spirals, and provides a simple geometrical model for analysis.

Findings

Discovered new spiral and flower patterns in confined chemical gardens.

Identified a class of self-similar logarithmic spirals across various parameters.

Showed confinement reduces buoyancy effects, enabling 2D pattern analysis.

Abstract

Chemical gardens are mineral aggregates that grow in three dimensions with plant-like forms and share properties with self-assembled structures like nano-scale tubes, brinicles or chimneys at hydrothermal vents. The analysis of their shapes remains a challenge, as their growth is influenced by osmosis, buoyancy and reaction-diffusion processes. Here we show that chemical gardens grown by injection of one reactant into the other in confined conditions feature a wealth of new patterns including spirals, flowers, and filaments. The confinement decreases the influence of buoyancy, reduces the spatial degrees of freedom and allows analysis of the patterns by tools classically used to analyze two-dimensional patterns. Injection moreover allows the study in controlled conditions of the effects of variable concentrations on the selected morphology. We illustrate these innovative aspects by characterizing quantitatively, with a simple geometrical model, a new class of self-similar logarithmic spirals observed in a large zone of the parameter space.