Dynamics of thermally driven capillary waves for two-dimensional droplets

Abstract

Capillary waves have been observed in systems ranging from the surfaces of ordinary fluids to interfaces in biological membranes and have been one of the most studied areas in the physics of fluids. Recent advances in fluorescence microscopy and imaging enabled quantitative measurements of thermally driven capillary waves in lipid monolayers and bilayers, which resulted in accurate measurements of the line tension in monolayer domains. Even though there has been a considerable amount of work on the statics and dynamics of capillary waves in three dimensions, to the best of our knowledge, there is no detailed theoretical analysis for two-dimensional droplet morphologies. In this paper, we derive the dynamic correlation function for two-dimensional fluid droplets using linear response theory and verify our results using a novel particle-based simulation technique for binary mixtures. © 2010 American Institute of Physics.