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Liquid-liquid phase separation is of special importance in many industrial and natural processes like the formation of rain droplets in clouds. Recent experiments performed in binary mixtures have shown that under slow cooling the phase separation is not continuous. Rather there are oscillatory bursts of massive nucleation alternating with quiescent periods [1-3].
In the present communication, we propose a simple lattice model to further explore the origin of the oscillatory behavior, the effects of a background flow on droplet nucleation, and the droplet-coalescence and droplet-growth processes. We show that the dynamics can be described by a system of M coupled differential equations, where M is determined by the cooling rate. We present our predictions for the steady states and for the transient behavior of the system, and compare them with experimental findings. References: [1] Vollmer (2008) J. Chem. Phys., [2] Auernhammer, Vollmer, Vollmer (2005) J.Chem. Phys. [3] Vollmer, Auernhammer, Vollmer (2007) Phys. Rev. Lett. |
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