Friday 12 April 2024 at 15:00

Venue: Lecture Theatre LG.02, Fry Building,  School of Mathematics, Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1UG
Followed by a drink reception in the Staff Common Room, Fry Building.

Universality of Satellite Formation During Breakup of a Fluid Bridge

Anna Frishman, Physics Department, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

Heilbronn Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, UK

The breakup of a fluid object is a remarkably singular process. Beautifully, the approach to this singularity can give rise to universal dynamics, occurring around the pinch off points. When breakup is driven by inertia in a symmetric configuration, the pinch off occurs symmetrically at two points, sealing off a satellite fluid drop.

Contrary to the dynamics at pinch off points, not much is known about universal dynamics for satellite formation.

Here we demonstrate the existence of such dynamics, leading to robust satellite sizes. Specifically, we consider the breakup of a slowly stretched fluid bridge, which we realize experimentally using a soap-film bubble suspended between two plates. Combining experiments and one-dimensional simulations, we show that a main satellite bubble always forms as the bridge breaks. We discover that the satellite size is a simple function of two non-dimensional control parameters, one dynamical and the other geometrical. These observations can be explained by tracing the bridge evolution over a series of dynamical stages in which the bridge: (i) closely follows a sequence of equilibrium bridge configurations; (ii) stretches as it begins to breakup after reaching an unstable equilibrium; and (iii) follows a universal breakup solution, occurring over a finite spatial region. We explain how stretching in stage (ii) controls the satellite volume, which varies with the control parameters over two orders of magnitude, and the universality of the dynamics makes it highly reproducible.

About the Speaker: Anna Frishman mainly works on turbulence, viewed as an out-of-equilibrium system at the intersection of fluid mechanics and statistical physics. From time to time, she works on problems in fluid mechanics without turbulence, and in statistical mechanics without fluids. Anna did her PhD in physics at the Weizmann institute of science under the supervision of Professor Gregory Falkovich. Then moved to Princeton University for an independent postdoc at the PCTS. She has been a faculty member in the physics department at the Technion, Israel, since 2019.

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