title: Hierarchical coarsening in the late stage of viscoelastic phase separation.
abstract: Coarsening is a general phenomenon in phase separating mixtures. In this study, we report a hierarchical coarsening at different length scales. Dispersed domains grew by direct combination of two/three small ones while some small domains can survive for a long time. The small angle laser light scattering showed that the scattered intensity exhibited multiple "decay-growth" transitions in the coarsening process. The evolution of the main peak gave a characteristic power law index of about -3/4, which is much faster than the -1/3 relationship from the traditional theories. We propose that relaxation and hydrodynamic flow play important roles in this process.
authors.affiliation: Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, Joint Laboratory of Polymer Science and Materials, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China. c.c.han@iccas.ac.cn.
authors.forename: Weichao
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Shi
authors.forename: Wei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Jian
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Zhiyuan
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: He
authors.forename: Charles C
authors.initials: CC
authors.lastname: Han