New publications

We haven’t written about our newest research in quite a while, but we’ve been quite busy in writing manuscripts and papers!

Novel numerical method for determining coexisting phases

We published the paper “flory: A Python package for finding coexisting phases in multicomponent mixtures” in the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS). The paper describes the python package flory that Yicheng developed. This package provides tools for minimizing the free energy of multiphase configurations of multicomponent mixtures, to determine coexisting phases. We already used it heavily in our manuscript on scaling relations in multicomponent mixtures.

Active viscoelastic condensates provide controllable mechanical anchor points

Oliver worked out a theory of chemically active droplets including viscoelastic material properties in new manuscript published on arxiv. We use the theory to explain the growth of centrosomes and particularly how centrosomes withstand forces during cell division. However, the theory is much more general, and we hypothesize that viscoelastic condensates could often form mechanical anchor points in cells.

Could Living Cells Use Phase Transitions to Process Information?

In collaboration with Arvind Murugan and Eric Dufresne, we wrote a manuscript for a perspective article that proposes that biomolecular condensates could help process information in cells. The main idea is that binodal lines of phase diagrams could play the role of decision boundaries. Viewed that way, condensates can be seen as physical computers!

Self-propulsion via non-transitive phase coexistence in chemically active mixtures

Yicheng published a manuscript on arxiv that describes the influence of weak chemical reactions onto coexisting phases. We find that the coexistence of bulk phases can still be described by a chemical potential balance, although the chemical potential needs to be generalized and now includes kinetic parameters. In contrast, cyclic fluxes at the interface deny a similar balance for pressures. In particular, we find dynamic states, including self-propulsion, when many phases are in contact.

Dynamics of phase separation in non-local elastic networks

Oliver wrote a manuscript describing the dynamic theory of droplet growth in elastic networks involving non-local interactions. This is an extension of our previous thermodynamic theory of pattern formation in such networks. We here derive a consistent description of the dynamics and use it to analyze the coarsening from spinodal instability to arrested patterns.