Paper detail

Apollonian Emulsions

We have discovered the existence of extremely polydisperse High Internal-Phase-Ratio Emulsions (HIPE) in which the internal-phase droplets, present at 95% volume fraction, remain spherical and organize themselves in the available space according to Apollonian packing rules. Such Apollonian emulsions are obtained from dispersing oil dropwise in water in the presence of very little surfactant, and allowing them to evolve at rest for a week. The packing structure of the droplets was confirmed through size distribution measurements that evolved spontaneously towards power laws with the known Apollonian exponents, as well as comparison of the structure factors of aged HIPEs measured by Small-Angle X-ray Scattering with that of a numerically simulated Random Apollonian Packing. Thanks to the perfect sphericity of the droplets, Apollonian emulsions were found to display Newtonian ow even at such extremely high volume fraction. We argue that these fascinating space-filling assemblies of spherical droplets are a result of coalescence and fragmentation processes obeying simple geometrical rules of conserving total volume and sphericity, minimizing the elastic energy associated with interactions of neighbouring droplets.