Decay Dynamics of a Single Spherical Domain in Near-Critical Phase-Separated Conditions

Domain decay is at the heart of the so-called evaporation-condensation Ostwald-ripening regime of phase ordering kinetics, where the growth of large domains occurs at the expense of smaller ones, which are expected to "evaporate." We experimentally investigate such decay dynamics at the level of a single spherical domain picked from one phase in coexistence and brought into the other phase by an optomechanical approach, in a near-critical phase-separated binary liquid mixture. We observe that the decay dynamics is generally not compatible with the theoretically expected surface-tension decay laws for conserved order parameters. Using a mean-field description, we quantitatively explain this apparent disagreement by the gradient of solute concentrations induced by gravity close to a critical point. Finally, we determine the conditions for which buoyancy becomes negligible compared to capillarity and perform dedicated experiments that retrieve the predicted surface-tension induced decay exponent. The surface-tension driven decay dynamics of conserved order parameter systems in the presence and the absence of gravity, is thus established at the level of a single domain.