Interfacial instability of confined three-dimensional active droplets
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Instabilities of fluid-fluid interfaces occur in many forms within passive soft matter. Adding activity to one of the fluids can dramatically change the stability of the interface. Triggering active flows externally offers a unique opportunity to study the linear growth of the instability and quantitatively compare experiment and theory. We investigate the interfacial instability of a deformable three-dimensional active nematic liquid crystal droplet confined between two parallel plates. Spontaneous active flows drive the growth of undulations along the active/passive interface, with the mode number of the fastest-growing mode increasing with droplet radius and decreasing with gap height. Applying the lubrication approximation to a minimal nematohydrodynamic model reveals that the growth rates of the interfacial modes are determined by the active timescale and the relaxation timescales associated with liquid crystalline order as well as capillary and viscous stresses. We find multiple points of agreement between experiment and theory, including the shape evolution of individual droplets, the growth rates of unstable modes averaged across many droplets, and the extensional shear flows observed within droplets.
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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 | 0.001 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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".