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Instabilities in complex mixtures with a large number of components

Richard P. Sear·Jose A. Cuesta
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Abstract

Inside living cells are complex mixtures of thousands of components. It is hopeless to try to characterise all the individual interactions in these mixtures. Thus, we develop a statistical approach to approximating them, and examine the conditions under which the mixtures phase separate. The approach approximates the matrix of second virial coefficients of the mixture by a random matrix, and determines the stability of the mixture from the spectrum of such random matrices.

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Richard P. Sear, Jose A. Cuesta. 2003-07-14. Instabilities in complex mixtures with a large number of components. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.91.245701

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