Berlin 2024 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 32: Poster: Active Matter, Soft Matter, Fluids

DY 32.2: Poster

Wednesday, March 20, 2024, 15:00–18:00, Poster C

Nucleation and Growth of Sessile Chemically Active Droplets — •Noah Ziethen and David Zwicker — Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, Germany

Driven chemical reactions can control the macroscopic properties of droplets, like their size. Moreover, such reactions control their formation from a homogeneous phase, e.g., for structuring biological cells. Inside cells, various organelles coexist and potentially interact with the complex cytoplasm. Understanding how the interaction of droplet material with boundaries modifies the droplet formation of size-controlled droplets is thus crucial.

Our numerical simulations reveal that reactions generally suppress nucleation in the presence of a boundary, as expected from homogeneous nucleation. Intriguingly, we uncover a coupled effect of wall interaction and chemical reactions, leading to shapes that deviate from spherical caps. We establish that these distortions result from anisotropic fluxes responding to the boundary conditions dictated by the Young Dupré equation. These findings demonstrate how the properties of stationary active droplets can deviate from their passive counterparts. In a biological context, such shape deformations may serve as a mechanism for cells to transition from a droplet state to a wetted film along the boundary.

Keywords: chemically active droplets; wetting; heterogeneous nucleation