Roughening of two-dimensional interfaces in nonequilibrium phase-separated systems

Abstract

I show that non-equilibrium two-dimensional interfaces between three dimensional phase separated fluids exhibit a peculiar "sub-logarithmic" roughness. Specifically, an interface of lateral extent $L$ will fluctuate vertically (i.e., normal to the mean surface orientation) a typical RMS distance $w\equiv\sqrt{\langle |h(\br,t)|^2\rangle} \propto [\ln{(L/a)}]^{1/3}$ (where $a$ is a microscopic length, and $ h(\br,t)$ is the height of the interface at two dimensional position $\br$ at time $t$). In contrast, the roughness of equilibrium two-dimensional interfaces between three dimensional fluids, obeys $w\propto [\ln (L/a){]}^{1/2}$. The exponent $1/3$ for the active case is exact. In addition, the characteristic time scales $\tau (L)$ in the active case scale according to $\tau (L)\propto L^3[\ln (L/a){]}^{1/3}$, in contrast to the simple $\tau (L)\propto L^3$ scaling found in equilibrium systems with conserved densities and no fluid flow.

4 pages, no figures

References in corpus (1)

• Capillary interfacial tension in active phase separation

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Theory of Capillary Tension and Interfacial Dynamics of Motility-Induced Phases
• Logarithmic or algebraic: roughening of an active Kardar-Parisi-Zhang surface
• Conservation laws and slow dynamics determine the universality class of interfaces in active matter