Composition Dependent Instabilities in Mixtures With Many Components

Abstract

Understanding the phase behavior of mixtures with many components is important in many contexts, including as a key step toward a physics-based description of intracellular compartmentalization. Here, we study the instabilities of a mixture model where the second virial coefficients are taken as random Gaussian variables. Using tools from free probability theory we obtain the exact spinodal curve and the nature of instabilities for a mixture with an arbitrary composition, thus lifting the assumption of uniform mixture component densities pervading previous studies. We show that, by controlling the volume fraction of only a few components, one can systematically change the nature of the spinodal instability and achieve demixing for realistic scenarios by a strong {\em composition imbalance amplification}. This results from a non-trivial interplay of entropic effects due to non-uniform composition and complexity in the interactions. Our approach allows for the inclusion of any finite number of structured interactions, leading to a competition between different forms of demixing as density is varied.

References in corpus (10)

• Phase transitions in biological systems with many components
• Instabilities in complex mixtures with a large number of components
• Self-assembly of biomolecular condensates with shared components
• Evolved interactions stabilize many coexisting phases in multicomponent liquids
• Dispersal-induced instability in complex ecosystems
• Low-frequency vibrational spectrum of mean-field disordered systems
• Thermodynamic stability and critical points in multicomponent mixtures with structured interactions
• Instabilities of complex fluids with partially structured and partially random interactions
• Multiphase coexistence in polydisperse colloidal mixtures
• Understanding Protein-Complex Assembly through Grand Canonical Maximum Entropy Modeling

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Reaction-driven Diffusiophoresis of Liquid Condensates: Mechanisms for Intra-cellular Organization
• Emergence of multiphase condensates from a limited set of chemical building blocks
• Liquid Hopfield model: retrieval and localization in multicomponent liquid mixtures
• Enhanced stability and chaotic condensates in multi-species non-reciprocal mixtures
• Phase separation in complex mixtures with many components: analytical expressions for spinodal manifolds
• Continuous-time multifarious systems -- Part I: equilibrium multifarious self-assembly
• Mobility-induced kinetic effects in multicomponent mixtures
• Species interconversion of deformable particles yields transient phase separation
• Random motility regulation as a generic mechanism of community formation