title: Instabilities in complex mixtures with a large number of components.
abstract: Inside living cells are complex mixtures of thousands of components. It is hopeless to try to characterize all the individual interactions in these mixtures. Thus, we develop a statistical approach to approximating them, and examine the conditions under which the mixtures phase separate. The approach approximates the matrix of second-virial coefficients of the mixture by a random matrix, and determines the stability of the mixture from the spectrum of such random matrices.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey GU2 7XH, United Kingdom. r.sear@surrey.ac.uk
authors.forename: Richard P
authors.initials: RP
authors.lastname: Sear
authors.forename: José A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Cuesta