Nucleation of chemically active droplets

Abstract

Driven chemical reactions can control the macroscopic properties of droplets, like their size. Such active droplets are critical in structuring the interior of biological cells. Cells also need to control where and when droplets appear, so they need to control droplet nucleation. Our numerical simulations demonstrate that reactions generally suppress nucleation if they stabilize the homogeneous state. An equilibrium surrogate model reveals that reactions increase the effective energy barrier of nucleation, enabling quantitative predictions of the increased nucleation times. Moreover, the surrogate model allows us to construct a phase diagram, which summarizes how reactions affect the stability of the homogeneous phase and the droplet state. This simple picture provides accurate predictions of how driven reactions delay nucleation, which is relevant for understanding droplets in biological cells and chemical engineering.

arXiv comment7 pages, 3 figures

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Active phase separation: new phenomenology from non-equilibrium physics
• Nonequilibrium interfacial properties of chemically driven fluids
• Reaction-driven Diffusiophoresis of Liquid Condensates: Mechanisms for Intra-cellular Organization
• Accelerated Ostwald ripening by chemical activity
• Gradient dynamics approach to reactive thin-film hydrodynamics
• Advection selects pattern in multistable emulsions of active droplets
• Enzyme-driven phase separation
• Hyperuniformity in active fluids reshapes nucleation and capillary-wave dynamics