Capillary Coarsening Drives Re-entrant Statistical Transitions in Early Coffee-Ring Growth
Abstract
Understanding how nonequilibrium systems evolve between distinct statistical regimes remains a fundamental challenge in statistical physics. Here we show that particle deposition at an evaporating contact line provides an experimental realization of cooperative one-dimensional deposition, in which post-deposition capillary attraction drives particles to migrate, cluster, and coarsen. As deposition proceeds, the cluster-width distribution undergoes a striking re-entrant transition, evolving from an initial exponential form to a peaked Gamma distribution and subsequently returning to an exponential form. This dynamic transition is accompanied by a non-monotonic crossover in fluctuation scaling, σw∼⟨ w⟩κ, with κ changing successively from $1$ to 1/2 and back to $1$. Monte Carlo simulations reproduce these statistical transitions. Our results establish evaporative contact-line deposition as a simple model of correlated one-dimensional assembly and reveal how local interactions can produce re-entrant statistical behaviour in a nonequilibrium system.
Related
- Interior-fold and endpoint transitions in finite-depth capillary-gravity ship wakes
- Dipolar colloids in three dimensions: non-equilibrium structure and re-entrant dynamics
- Phase Separation in Fractonic Fluids: Coarsening, Interfaces, Nucleation, and Hyperuniformity in and out of Equilibrium
- Re-entrant p-wave superconductivity in a Chern Dartboard Insulator
- Cutting, Shuffling and Diffusion as a Coarsening Process
BibTeX
@misc{chandradasan2026capillary,
title = {{Capillary Coarsening Drives Re-entrant Statistical Transitions in Early Coffee-Ring Growth}},
author = {Arundas Chandradasan and Dileep Mampallil},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2611.04388},
eprint = {2611.04388},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04388},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Capillary Coarsening Drives Re-entrant Statistical Transitions in Early Coffee-Ring Growth
AU - Arundas Chandradasan
AU - Dileep Mampallil
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/03
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2611.04388
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04388
AB - Understanding how nonequilibrium systems evolve between distinct statistical regimes remains a fundamental challenge in statistical physics. Here we show that particle deposition at an evaporating contact line provides an experimental realization of cooperative one-dimensional deposition, in which post-deposition capillary attraction drives particles to migrate, cluster, and coarsen. As deposition proceeds, the cluster-width distribution undergoes a striking re-entrant transition, evolving from an initial exponential form to a peaked Gamma distribution and subsequently returning to an exponential form. This dynamic transition is accompanied by a non-monotonic crossover in fluctuation scaling, σ_w∼⟨ w⟩^κ, with κ changing successively from $1$ to 1/2 and back to $1$. Monte Carlo simulations reproduce these statistical transitions. Our results establish evaporative contact-line deposition as a simple model of correlated one-dimensional assembly and reveal how local interactions can produce re-entrant statistical behaviour in a nonequilibrium system.
ER -