Regensburg 2025 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 34: Statistical Physics in Biological Systems II (joint session DY/BP)

BP 34.5: Talk

Friday, March 21, 2025, 12:45–13:00, H43

Multicomponent mixtures exhibit a vast nucleation-and-growth regime — •Yicheng Qiang, Chengjie Luo, and David Zwicker — Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Am Faßberg 17, 37077 Göttingen, Germany

Phase coexistence is crucial for understanding how cells regulate biomolecular condensates. Despite of the multicomponent and multiphase nature of such condensates, the direct study of coexisting phases is limited to only few components since the parameter space is high-dimensional. So far, no theory provides a direct and concrete estimation of the phase coexistence behavior of multicomponent mixtures. As a first-level description of multicomponent phase behavior, we derive scaling relations for the number of coexisting phases in typical multicomponent mixtures in equilibrium. The scaling relations reveal that the interactions required to have many coexisting phases only scales very weakly with the number of components, whereas the stability analysis of the homogeneous state suggests a much stronger scaling. This discrepancy implies that large parts of the phase diagram of multicomponent mixture are in the nucleation-and-growth regime, where the homogeneous state is locally stable while multiple coexisting phases are preferred energetically. This suggests that multicomponent mixtures can achieve versatility and controllability in phase behavior with moderate interactions, which might be utilized by cells to create or destroy biomolecular condensates.

Keywords: multicomponent mixture; phase diagram; biomolecular condensates