Boundary-Driven Anisotropic Coarsening in Conserved Phase Separation

Abstract

Universal scaling in phase separation is typically assumed to be isotropic in systems with conserved dynamics. Here we show that boundary forcing alone can break this dynamical scaling symmetry, leading to anisotropic coarsening, with different effective global growth laws observed parallel and perpendicular to the boundary. We consider a ternary mixture with two conserved components and a passive species undergoing surface evaporation, which provides a simple setting to investigate this effect. In this case, evaporation leads to a progressive mass loss and to the formation of macroscopic concentration gradients, which, in turn, drive anisotropic coarsening, with different effective growth laws observed parallel and perpendicular to the boundary. At the same time, bulk regions appear to retain the standard Model B scaling, suggesting that the observed anisotropy is mainly induced by boundary fluxes rather than by changes in the intrinsic dynamics. Our results indicate that boundary conditions can play an important role in breaking scaling symmetry and may offer a way to influence coarsening behavior in nonequilibrium phase separation.