The coexistence region in the Van der Waals fluid and the liquid-liquid phase transitions

Abstract

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Cellular membraneless organelles are thought to be droplets formed within the two-phase region corresponding to proteinaceous systems endowed with the liquid-liquid transition. However, their metastability requires an additional constraint—they arise in a certain region of density and temperature between the spinodal and binodal lines. Here, we consider the well-studied van der Waals fluid as a test model to work out criteria to determine the location of the spinodal line for situations in which the equation of state is not known. Our molecular dynamics studies indicate that this task can be accomplished by considering the specific heat, the surface tension and characteristics of the molecular clusters, such as the number of component chains and radius of gyration.

Keywords

• Van der Waals fluid
• phase diagam
• liquid-liquid phase transitions
• intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs)
• molecular dynamics simulations (MD)