1 research outputs found
Phase Transition in Liquid Drop Fragmentation
A liquid droplet is fragmented by a sudden pressurized-gas blow, and the
resulting droplets, adhered to the window of a flatbed scanner, are counted and
sized by computerized means. The use of a scanner plus image recognition
software enables us to automatically count and size up to tens of thousands of
tiny droplets with a smallest detectable volume of approximately 0.02 nl. Upon
varying the gas pressure, a critical value is found where the size-distribution
becomes a pure power-law, a fact that is indicative of a phase transition. Away
from this transition, the resulting size distributions are well described by
Fisher's model at coexistence. It is found that the sign of the surface
correction term changes sign, and the apparent power-law exponent tau has a
steep minimum, at criticality, as previously reported in Nuclear
Multifragmentation studies [1,2]. We argue that the observed transition is not
percolative, and introduce the concept of dominance in order to characterize
it. The dominance probability is found to go to zero sharply at the transition.
Simple arguments suggest that the correlation length exponent is nu=1/2. The
sizes of the largest and average fragments, on the other hand, do not go to
zero but behave in a way that appears to be consistent with recent predictions
of Ashurst and Holian [3,4].Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures. LaTeX (revtex4) with psfig/epsfi