Elastocapillary coalescence: aggregation and fragmentation with a maximal size.
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.
Boudaoud
Arezki
A
Laboratoire de Physique Statistique, UMR 8550 du CNRS/ENS/Paris 6/Paris 7, 24 rue Lhomond, Paris Cedex 5, France.
Bico
José
J
Roman
Benoît
B