Marcel developed and analyzed a generalized coarsening model to explain chromosomal crossover placements during meiosis (arxiv.org/abs/2509.09521). This model provides a coherent explanation of experimental data across mutants and species!

Cathelijne discovered that the energy required to maintain Turing patterns can be reduced substantially if the involved molecules repel each other (arxiv.org/abs/2509.05093). This work permits a thermodynamic analysis of this classical reaction-diffusion system!

Oliver looked at the dynamics of phase separation in elastic networks, where non-local effects arrest coarsening and lead to patterns with a well-defined length scale (arxiv.org/abs/2508.09829). These patterns can be realized experimentally to make materials with interesting optical properties!

Yicheng discovered that driven chemical reactions between solvent components can induce a pressure difference at interfaces (arxiv.org/abs/2508.09816). This can lead to fun effects, including self-propulsion, and showcases the surprising versatility of chemically active emulsions.

We updated our pre-print on equilibria in multicomponent mixtures: arxiv.org/abs/2405.01138 In particular, we added the figure below, which shows that such mixtures exhibit countless metastable states between a metastable homogeneous state and the equilibrium with many phases.

Excited for the #DPG meeting in Regensburg this week! Our group has a number of contributions across various sections. We look forward to discuss our science with you!

I agree! The best I can probably do (with my limited illustrator skills) is the figure below. I think this is already better than what we had before, so thanks for the suggestion!

More generally, we derive scaling laws for the number of coexisting phases. This allows us to predict that typical multicomponent mixtures can have many different droplets (large N_p) even when the homogeneous state is stable (small N_u), showing the multistability more generally.

The little text summarizes the main result of a longer article that we recently updated on arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2405.01138
For instance, we show that a concrete system possesses many stable states with various droplets, indicating that this system is multistable.

We released the first version of our Python package `py-pde` five years ago. We heavily use this package to investigate partial differential equations numerically. The documentation at py-pde.readthedocs.io shows how to use the package, e.g., to solve the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation:

Third, cells are alive and use fuel to drive processes out of equilibrium. In particular, they can modify the physical interactions of molecules against the thermodynamic tendency. The resulting active matter can exhibit controlled nucleation, shape deformations, and even division.

Second, the cellular environment contains many solid-like structures, like the cytoskeleton, and softer structures, like membranes. Condensates interact with those structures by wetting, which affects their shape, size, and location.

First, condensates comprise many different biomolecules, which are diverse and individually complex. This implies that cellular droplets posses complex internal behavior, e.g., in terms of their material properties.

We wrote a review on the "Physics of droplet regulation in biological cells": arxiv.org/abs/2501.13639 Beside the basic #physics of phase separation, we discuss three aspects that separate cellular from traditional droplets:

We also analyzed the corresponding field theory and found equilibrium states with periodic patterns, which correspond to arrested droplet sizes. The pattern period decreases with larger charge asymmetry due to a trade-off between interfacial and electrostatic effects (see schematic).

The main point is that the salt ions, that usually neutralize charges locally and thus mediate screening, can be affected by phase separation. In our example, salt ions get expelled from droplets, so droplets acquire a net charge, and cannot grow indefinitely; see attached MD simulations.