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Updated: Aug 11, 2025

Combining Microfluidics and Microrheology to Determine Rheological Properties of Soft Matter during Repeated Phase Transitions
Published on: April 19, 2018
The coexistence region in the Van der Waals fluid and the liquid-liquid phase transitions
Dinh Quoc Huy Pham1, Mateusz Chwastyk1, Marek Cieplak1
1Institute of Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland.
Abstract:
Cellular membraneless organelles are thought to be droplets formed within the two-phase region corresponding to proteinaceous systems endowed with the liquid-liquid transition. However, their metastability requires an additional constraint-they arise in a certain region of density and temperature between the spinodal and binodal lines. Here, we consider the well-studied van der Waals fluid as a test model to work out criteria to determine the location of the spinodal line for situations in which the equation of state is not known. Our molecular dynamics studies indicate that this task can be accomplished by considering the specific heat, the surface tension and characteristics of the molecular clusters, such as the number of component chains and radius of gyration.
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