Hierarchical coarsening in the late stage of viscoelastic phase separation.

Shi, Weichao; Liu, Wei; Yang, Jian; He, Zhiyuan; Han, Charles C · Soft Matter · 2014

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

Coarsening is a general phenomenon in phase separating mixtures. In this study, we report a hierarchical coarsening at different length scales. Dispersed domains grew by direct combination of two/three small ones while some small domains can survive for a long time. The small angle laser light scattering showed that the scattered intensity exhibited multiple "decay-growth" transitions in the coarsening process. The evolution of the main peak gave a characteristic power law index of about -3/4, which is much faster than the -1/3 relationship from the traditional theories. We propose that relaxation and hydrodynamic flow play important roles in this process.