Crystal growth in a channel: Pulsating fingers, merry-go-round patterns, and seesaw dynamics

Abstract

We perform phase-field simulations of unsteady crystal growth in a three-dimensional capillary. Motivated by the appearance of chirality-symmetry breaking periodic states in our preceding study, we here focus on more general dynamic states. Most of these are obtained in the limit of isotropic surface tension, but we test genericity by looking at a few cases with weak anisotropy. Whereas steady states are similar for all channel shapes studied so far, including channels with circular, hexagonal, quadratic, and triangular cross sections, there is a stronger dependence on the cross section for time-dependent states. Various oscillatory modes are identified and discussed, including rotating and swinging patterns as well as pulsating modes containing one, two, and four fingers, respectively.