Phase-Field Model of Long-Time Glasslike Relaxation in Binary Fluid Mixtures

We present a new phase-field model for binary fluids, exhibiting typical signatures of soft-glassy behavior, such as long-time relaxation, aging, and long-term dynamical arrest. The present model allows the cost of building an interface to vanish locally within the interface, while preserving positivity of the overall surface tension. A crucial consequence of this property, which we prove analytically, is the emergence of free-energy minimizing density configurations, hereafter named “compactons,” to denote their property of being localized to a finite-size region of space and strictly zero elsewhere (no tails). Thanks to compactness, any arbitrary superposition of compactons still is a free-energy minimizer, which provides a direct link between the complexity of the free-energy landscape and the morphological complexity of configurational space.