Morphology: At early times, system contains very long (but not thin and fibrillar) LC-rich domains. At late times, these domains shorten but are still elongated.
Resulting intermediate/late-time structure: Elongated LC-rich domains (minor phase) in a polymer-rich matrix (major phase). View phi and S profiles.
Evolution of degree of PS and PO.
for PS (red): delta_phi(t) = phimax(t) - phimin(t)
for PO (blue): S(t) = Smax(t)
Plot indicates that PS is significant at t~6 and PO is significant at t~8. phi and S profiles reveal that these times (at which this plot indicates a high degree of PS and PO) represent when PS and PO begin to be significant. (That is, there is at least one or two small regions that have strongly phase separated or ordered.)
For this quench, PS is strong by t=6. PO, however, is not well-established until t~14, when the LCs in several LC-rich domains are highly ordered. This time is not that much later than t=8, but at t=8 there is only one higly ordered LC-rich droplet.
#1: "new" k1 -- from phi-based S(k).
R ~ t1/3 (for a very short time) --> slower than t1/4.
t1/3 behavior short-lived for this deeper quench. (Compare with shallower quench A4-1.) Ordering is already significant by the time either quench exhibits growth slower than t1/3. Perhaps the time at which domain growth slows down is when the rate for ordering becomes greater than the rate for PS. (Ordering may be significant, but may not "grow" at a faster rate than PS.) How do we determine this?
PS greater/faster with deeper quench => faster PS leads to PO earlier even though both quenches are INITIALLY unstable wrt PS ONLY. Slower domain growth in nonlinear regime already.
At first, domain growth for the shallower quench (A4) is faster than for this deeper quench (F3), but domain growth for shallow quench eventually slows down and this results in a faster growth rate for the deeper quench.
Jump to the individual results of the quench with (phi0, T, N) of:
Other links:
www.chem.ucla.edu/~aml/research.html
Last updated August 1, 1999.