Phase Amplification in Spinodal Decomposition of Immiscible Fluids with Interconversion of Species

TL;DR

This paper investigates phase amplification during spinodal decomposition in fluids with interconverting species, revealing how interconversion dynamics break conservation laws and lead to one phase dominating, characterized by new scaling laws.

Contribution

It introduces a novel model combining Kawasaki and Glauber dynamics to study phase amplification in interconverting fluid mixtures, a phenomenon not previously explored.

Findings

Interconversion breaks particle conservation, enabling phase amplification.

The speed of phase amplification follows specific scaling laws.

Complete elimination of one phase occurs due to interconversion dynamics.

Abstract

A fluid composed of two molecular species may undergo phase segregation via spinodal decomposition. However, if the two molecular species can interconvert, e.g. change their chirality, then a phenomenon of phase amplification, which has not been studied so far, emerges. As a result, eventually, one phase will completely eliminate the other one. We model this phenomenon on an Ising system which relaxes to equilibrium through a hybrid of Kawasaki-diffusion and Glauber-interconversion dynamics. By introducing a probability of Glauber-interconversion dynamics, we show that the particle conservation law is broken, thus resulting in phase amplification. We characterize the speed of phase amplification through scaling laws based on the probability of Glauber dynamics, system size, and distance to the critical temperature of demixing.