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Microfluidic crystals

Impossible order

Nature Physics volume 2, pages 733–734 (2006)Cite this article

The discovery that microfluidic 'crystals' exhibit long-range collective behaviour demonstrates their potential use as a testbed for studying dissipative self-organization and other non-equilibrium phenomena.

At equilibrium, one-dimensional crystals cannot exist as their order is destroyed by thermal fluctuations. In an Einstein crystal — one in which atoms oscillate independently of one another in a linear array of simple harmonic potentials — the mean amplitude of oscillations grows linearly with the macroscopic size of the crystallite, enabling atoms within it to break free of the potentials that hold them in place. For similar reasons, two-dimensional crystals are also difficult to observe as the root-mean-square displacement grows logarithmically with the size of the lattice, which allows only small assemblies to survive. Yet on page 743 of this issue, Beatus and colleagues1 observe the emergence of collective behaviour of an exotic variant of such a crystal — that defined by a regularly spaced sequence of droplets injected into a quasi-two-dimensional microfluidic channel. This behaviour is manifest by the propagation of ultra-slow phonon-like vibrational modes along the chain of droplets — something that is quite unexpected in a system in which viscous damping effects dominate, and an interesting example of progress towards the description of non-equilibrium systems.

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Figure 1: Self-organization in dissipative microfluidic systems.

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  1. the Institute of Physical Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences, Kasprzaka 44/52, Warsaw, 01-224, Poland

    Piotr Garstecki

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  1. Piotr Garstecki
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Garstecki, P. Impossible order. Nature Phys 2, 733–734 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys455

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys455

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