Determine whether medium-range ordering causes slower boundary kinetics

Determine whether enhanced medium-range positional ordering near adsorbing boundaries causally produces the progressively slower coarsening kinetics observed in the free-draining Brownian-dynamics wall region.

Background

The free-draining Brownian-dynamics adsorbed region exhibits a non-stationary coarsening exponent and stronger medium-range positional order than the corresponding hydrodynamic simulations. The paper proposes that increased local ordering may hinder cooperative rearrangement and thereby generate progressively slower boundary kinetics.

The simulations do not establish whether ordering is the cause of kinetic slowing. The authors state that independent bond-orientational or common-neighbour analyses would be required to test this possible causal relationship.

References

Increased local ordering may hinder cooperative rearrangement and generate progressively slower boundary kinetics. The present data suggest, but do not establish, this ordering–mobility connection.

— Adsorbing Boundaries Stratify the Kinetics of Confined Colloidal Phase Separation  (2609.16583 - Lin et al., 15 Sep 2026) in Section “Boundary-constrained coarsening,” page 8; Section “Morphology changes more strongly than local packing,” page 12

These relations provide a falsifiable mechanism rather than a parameter-free interpretation of the present data. The BD wall exponent is non-stationary, and neither 𝑑] , 𝜇 nor 𝛼 has been measured independently. We therefore do not invert the observed effective exponents to determine these quantities. The decisive tests are direct measurements of the domain mass–size relation 𝑁L(𝑅L), domain mobility𝐷'(𝑁L) , domain separation ℓL(𝑡) and surface-mass evolution Σ-(𝑡) .

— Adsorbing Boundaries Stratify the Kinetics of Confined Colloidal Phase Separation  (2609.16583 - Lin et al., 15 Sep 2026) in Section “A scaling framework for island-like surface coarsening,” page 14