Low density phases in a uniformly charged liquid with homogeneous neutralizing background
Cyril Muratov, NJIT

Abstract:
This talk is concerned with the macroscopic behavior of global energy minimizers in the three-dimensional sharp interface unscreened Ohta-Kawasaki model of diblock copolymer melts. This model is also referred to as the nuclear liquid drop model in the studies of the structure of highly compressed nuclear matter found in the crust of neutron stars, and, more broadly, is a paradigm for energy-driven pattern forming systems in which spatial order arises as a result of the competition of short-range attractive and long-range repulsive forces. We are interested in the large volume behavior of minimizers in the low volume fraction regime, in which one expects the formation of a periodic lattice of small droplets of the minority phase in a sea of the majority phase. Under periodic boundary conditions, we prove that the considered energy Γ-converges to an energy functional of the limit “homogenized” measure associated with the minority phase consisting of a local linear term and a non-local quadratic term mediated by the Coulomb kernel. As a consequence, asymptotically the mass of the minority phase in a minimizer spreads evenly across the domain. We also prove that the energy density distributes uniformly across the domain as well, and that minimizers appear as a uniformly distributed array of droplets, most of which minimize the energy density for the volume constrained whole space problem. This is joint work with H. Knuepfer and M. Novaga.