title: Elastocapillary coalescence: aggregation and fragmentation with a maximal size.
abstract: Aggregation processes generally lead to broad distributions of sizes involving exponential tails. Here, experiments on the capillary-driven coalescence of regularly spaced flexible structures yields a self-similar distribution of sizes with no tail. At a given step, the physical process imposes a maximal size for the aggregates, which appears as the relevant scale for the distribution. A simple toy model involving the aggregation of nearest neighbors exhibits the same statistics. A mean-field theory accounting for a maximal size is in agreement with both experiments and numerics. This approach is extended to iterative fragmentation processes where the largest object is broken at each step.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Physique Statistique, UMR 8550 du CNRS/ENS/Paris 6/Paris 7, 24 rue Lhomond, Paris Cedex 5, France.
authors.forename: Arezki
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Boudaoud
authors.forename: José
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Bico
authors.forename: Benoît
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Roman