Dresden 2020 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 8: Poster I

BP 8.7: Poster

Monday, March 16, 2020, 17:30–19:30, P2/1OG

Effective simulation of many interacting droplets — •Ajinkya Kulkarni and David Zwicker — Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, Germany

It has recently been discovered that liquid droplets play an important role in organizing material inside biological cells. However, so far it is unclear how a large number of droplets behave in the heterogeneous environment of the cell. Traditionally, liquid-liquid phase separation is numerically studied using Monte-Carlo simulations, Molecular Dynamics simulations, or by solving the Cahn-Hilliard equation on a lattice. All these methods are computationally expensive since they have to resolve spatial structures on the scale of individual particles. This severely limits the system sizes that can be studied.

We propose a novel simulation method to tackle this limitation. Our method describes droplets explicitly by a position and a radius, while the dilute phase is represented by a concentration field. Assuming that droplets are far enough away from each other, they only interact by exchanging material via the dilute phase. Since the dilute phase is sufficiently described by a coarse discretization of the diffusion equation, our method is orders of magnitude faster than the traditional ones. Consequently, our method allows simulating the dynamics of many droplets on length- and timescales relevant to biological cells.