Solvent-Induced Triradial Pattern Formation on Solid-Supported Viscoelastic Thin Films and Gels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Solvent-driven surface instabilities in soft materials offer a powerful route to generate spontaneous patterns without external templating; yet the mechanisms governing their emergence, evolution, and long-term modulation remain elusive. Here, we uncover the time-dependent formation of quasi-periodic triradial patterns on the surface of thin, soft silicone-based viscous films undergoing hexane extraction and drying. Using dual-wavelength reflection interference contrast microscopy, we observe a reproducible morphological progression: from shallow circular domains at short extraction times to a well-defined array of triradial, three-armed patterns at longer durations, driven by the buildup of internal stress, surface-to-bulk modulus gradients, and network densification. Systematic studies across silicone elastomers and gels reveal that while the triradial patterning is broadly conserved, its geometry is tunable by factors such as cross-link density and solvent retention. These results establish a general mechanism of solvent-mediated pattern formation in soft silicone-based viscous films and offer a potential route for designing dynamic and programmable surface architectures through controlled solvent processing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".