Early sedimentation and crossover kinetics in an off-critical phase-separating liquid mixture

Early sedimentation in a liquid mixture off-critically quenched in its miscibility gap was investigated with a light attenuation technique. The time evolution of the droplet distribution is characteristic of an emulsion coalescing by gravitational collisions. This sedimentation behavior gave access to the phase-separating kinetics, and a crossover on the way toward equilibrium was observed, which separates free growth from conserved order-parameter coarsening with a crossover time fitting well with theoretical predictions.