MONTE-CARLO SIMULATIONS OF PHASE-SEPARATION IN CHEMICALLY REACTIVE BINARY-MIXTURES

We present Monte Carlo simulations of a binary mixture simultaneously undergoing spinodal decomposition and the chemical reaction A half arrow right over half arrow left B. The competing processes give rise to novel, steady-state pattern formation with domain size scaling with reaction rate to a power, s, which equals the domain growth exponent, alpha, in the absence of chemical reactions. Our findings support recent numerical simulations of a Cahn-Hilliard-type model, suggesting that chemical reactions can be used to stabilize and tune patterns arising during phase separation.