Berlin 2024 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

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

DY 32.8: Poster

Mittwoch, 20. März 2024, 15:00–18:00, Poster C

Tuning kinetics of chemically fueled droplets — •Lennard Holschuh and Joachim Dzubiella — Physikalisches Institut, Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg, Germany

Membraneless organelles like centrosomes play an essential part in intracellular structuring. A similar behaviour can be mimicked by active droplets resulting from phase separation introduced by a chemical reaction that depends on the available fuel. Recent experiments with synthetic molecules in a chemically fueled reaction cycle explore the non-equilibrium behaviour of these active droplets. In our work, a two-state chemical reaction is modeled with a two-dimensional reactive Brownian dynamics simulation and compared to a macroscopic description with the Fokker-Planck equation. In the simulation, particles with state 0 are soluble and particles in state 1 - which are activated via the consumption of fuel - become attractive and are able to accumulate to droplets. In the case of a saturated system, expected power laws for the radius of the droplets as well as for the number of droplets are recovered. A coordination-dependent distinction of `internal' and `external' particles of the droplet gives further control over the deactivation process. The simulation shows that deactivation of only external particles slows down the decay and stabilizes the droplets, whereas the deactivation of only internal particles can lead to a temporary encapsulation of deactivated particles where the chemically active particles serve as shell. Similarities and differences to related experiments are discussed.

Keywords: Chemical reaction; Active droplets; Brownian dynamics