Experimental observation of local rearrangements in dense quasi-two-dimensional emulsion flow

We experimentally study rearranging regions in slow athermal flow by observing the flow of a concentrated oil-in-water emulsion in a thin chamber with a constricting hopper shape. The gap of the chamber is smaller than the droplet diameters, so that the droplets are compressed into quasi-two-dimensional pancakes. We focus on localized rearrangements known as "T1 events" where four droplets exchange neighbors. Flowing droplets are deformed due to forces from neighboring droplets, and these deformations are decreased by nearby T1 events, with a spatial dependence related to the local structure. We see a tendency of the T1 events to occur in small clusters.