Nonequilibrium patterns in phase-separating ternary membranes

Abstract

We present a nonequilibrium approach for the study of a two-dimensional phase-separating ternary mixture. When the component that promotes phase separation is dynamically exchanged with the medium, the separation process is halted and actively maintained finite-size segregation domains appear in the system. In addition to this effect, already reported in our earlier work [J. Gómez, F. Sagués, and R. Reigada, Phys. Rev. E 77, 021907 (2008)], the use of a generic Ginzburg-Landau formalism and the inclusion of thermal fluctuations provide a more dynamic description of the resulting domain organization. Its size, shape, and stability properties are studied. Larger and more circular and stable domains are formed when decreasing the recycling rate, increasing the mobility of the exchanged component, and the mixture is quenched deeper. We expect this outcome to be of applicability in raft phenomenology in plasmatic cell membranes.