Quantifying the long-range structure of foams and other cellular patterns with hyperuniformity disorder length...

We investigate the local and long-range structure of several space-filling cellular patterns: bubbles in a quasi-two-dimensional foam, and Voronoi constructions made around points that are uncorrelated (Poisson patterns), low discrepancy (Halton patterns), and displaced from a lattice by Gaussian noise (Einstein patterns). We study local structure with distributions of quantities including cell areas and side numbers. The former is the widest for the bubbles making foams the most locally disordered, while the latter show no major differences between the cellular patterns. To study long-range structure, we begin by representing the cellular systems as patterns of points, both unweighted and weighted by cell area. For this, foams are represented by their bubble centroids and the Voronoi constructions are represented by the centroids as well as the points from which they are created. Long-range structure is then quantified in two ways: by the spectral density, and by a real-space analog where the variance of density fluctuations for a set of measuring windows of diameter D is made more intuitive by conversion to the distance h(D) from the window boundary where these fluctuations effectively occur. The unweighted bubble centroids have h(D) that collapses for the different ages of the foam with random Poissonian fluctuations at long distances. The area-weighted bubble centroids and area-weighted Voronoi points all have constant h(D)=h_{e} for large D; the bubble centroids have the smallest value h_{e}=0.084sqrt[〈a〉], meaning they are the most uniform. Area-weighted Voronoi centroids exhibit collapse of h(D) to the same constant h_{e}=0.084sqrt[〈a〉] as for the bubble centroids. A similar analysis is performed on the edges of the cells and the spectra of h(D) for the foam edges show h(D)∼D^{1-ε} where ε=0.30±0.15.