Dresden 2026 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 14: Poster Session II

BP 14.84: Poster

Dienstag, 10. März 2026, 18:00–21:00, P2

Effective binary models of multicomponent phase separation — •Henri Schmidt and David Zwicker — Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, Germany

Biological cells rely on biomolecular condensates for spatiotemporal organization. Condensates consist of many differently interacting biomolecules, which leads to a rich and complex configuration space.

Yet, only a few types of molecules can be measured in experiments, and the resulting phase behavior is typically explained using low-dimensional models. To understand the conditions under which such dimensionality reduction is feasible, we numerically explore multicomponent phase separation and ask when the behavior of a particular component can be explained by simple binary phase separation. This is surprisingly often the case, even when the unobserved components undergo phase separation on their own. However, the predicted interaction parameters and molecular volumes typically deviate from their true values, indicating that the reduction introduced systematic measurement errors.

Understanding the details of the dimensionality reduction will allow us to better probe multicomponent phase separation by observing a few components in the future.

Keywords: droplets; phase separation; multi-component systems; dimensionality reduction; equilibrium thermodynamics