Self-organized criticality driven by droplet influx and random fusion

The droplet size distribution typically decays exponentially in solutions formed by liquid-liquid phase separation. Nevertheless, a power-law distribution of nucleolus volumes has been observed in amphibian oocytes, which appears similar to the cluster size distribution in reaction-limited aggregation. In this work, we study the mechanism of power-law distributed droplet sizes and unveil a self-organized criticality driven by droplet influx and random fusion between droplets. Surprisingly, the droplet size dynamics is governed by a Smoluchowski equation similar to the cluster size in aggregation systems. The system reaches a critical state as the area fraction approaches the critical value at which the droplet size has a power-law distribution with an exponent of 1.5. The system is also spatially scale-free, with a divergent correlation length at the critical state, marked by giant droplet-density fluctuations and power-law decay of the pair correlation function. Published by the American Physical Society 2025

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Physical Review Research

• Publication date

  2025-02-10

• Fields of study

  Physics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1103/physrevresearch.7.l022060arXiv 2502.06236
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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