The Dissolution of a Liquid Interface.
Abstract
We investigate the dissolving interface between the phases of a critical binary mixture whose temperature has abruptly been raised from an initial state of temperature and composition equilibrium in the mixture's two phase region to an evolving state whose equilibrium temperature is in the system's one phase region. By measuring autocorrelation functions for surface light scattering from thermally driven capillary waves, we determine the effective surface tension of the dissolving interface. In this experiment our system is a mixture of cyclohexane and methanol at near-critical composition (71.7 % cyclohexane). After we abruptly raise the temperature above T_c, the nonequilibrium interface dissolves very slowly. The evolution of the measured surface tension shows that the interface dissolves slower than one expects when assuming a pure diffusion model, in qualitative agreement with our previous measurements on the even more slowly dissolving isobutyric acid and water mixture(S. E. May and J. V. Maher, Phys. Rev. Lett. 67, 2013 (1991)) .
- Publication:
-
APS March Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- March 1997
- Bibcode:
- 1997APS..MAR.R1601V