Issue 35, 2023

Experimental observations of fractal landscape dynamics in a dense emulsion

Abstract

Many soft and biological materials display so-called ‘soft glassy’ dynamics; their constituents undergo anomalous random motions and complex cooperative rearrangements. A recent simulation model of one soft glassy material, a coarsening foam, suggested that the random motions of its bubbles are due to the system configuration moving over a fractal energy landscape in high-dimensional space. Here we show that the salient geometrical features of such high-dimensional fractal landscapes can be explored and reliably quantified, using empirical trajectory data from many degrees of freedom, in a model-free manner. For a mayonnaise-like dense emulsion, analysis of the observed trajectories of oil droplets quantitatively reproduces the high-dimensional fractal geometry of the configuration path and its associated local energy minima generated using a computational model. That geometry in turn drives the droplets' complex random motion observed in real space. Our results indicate that experimental studies can elucidate whether the similar dynamics in different soft and biological materials may also be due to fractal landscape dynamics.

Graphical abstract: Experimental observations of fractal landscape dynamics in a dense emulsion

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
28 Jun 2023
Accepted
23 Aug 2023
First published
29 Aug 2023

Soft Matter, 2023,19, 6805-6813

Author version available

Experimental observations of fractal landscape dynamics in a dense emulsion

C. Rodríguez-Cruz, M. Molaei, A. Thirumalaiswamy, K. Feitosa, V. N. Manoharan, S. Sivarajan, D. H. Reich, R. A. Riggleman and J. C. Crocker, Soft Matter, 2023, 19, 6805 DOI: 10.1039/D3SM00852E

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