Size control guidelines for chemically active droplets

Abstract

Biological cells and synthetic analogues use liquid-liquid phase separation to dynamically compartmentalize their environment for various applications. In many cases, multiple droplets need to coexist, and their size needs to be controlled, which is challenging because large droplets tend to grow at the expense of smaller ones. Chemical reactions can, in principle, control droplet sizes, but there are no clear guidelines on how to robustly achieve size control. To provide guidelines, we consider a binary fluid model driven out of equilibrium by chemical reactions. We reveal two different classes of size-controlled droplets, depending on the ratio of droplet radius to the reaction-diffusion length. Moreover, we determine parameter regimes in which droplets become small. Taken together, our theory allows us to separately predict the chemical reactions necessary for maintaining droplets of a given class or size.