Soft cells, Tubular Tilings and the Hidden Phases in Binary Mixtures

Abstract

Biological and physical systems ranging from Fermi surfaces and skeletal structures to reaction--diffusion patterns and cosmological models may be viewed as binary mixtures in which a smooth interface separates two complementary phases. While the interface is often directly observable, the topology of one of the phases may remain hidden. To study such systems, we introduce tubular tilings, a geometric framework for discretizing binary mixtures on smooth manifolds of arbitrary dimension and topology. We prove that tubular tilings satisfy global Euler balance laws relating the topology of the ambient manifold, the discretized phases, and their interfaces. These balance laws provide a practical inference principle: topological information about a hidden phase can be recovered from the observable phase and the geometry of the separating interface. We further show that, in dimensions $d>2$, tubular tilings form a subclass of soft tilings, the recently discovered class of corner-free tessellations. Applications to Fermi surfaces and cosmological shell decompositions illustrate how the theory can be used to extract otherwise inaccessible topological information about complex geometric structures.