Mullins-Sekerka motion of small droplets on a fixed boundary (Q5950223)

The authors analyse the evolution of a small two-dimensional droplet under the Mullins-Sekerka law of motion. The situation models a late stage of phase separation in, say, a binary alloy, in which an inclusion of one phase attached to the boundary of the region containing the alloy, moves toward an area of high curvature of the boundary so as to decrease the perimeter. The analysis is valid in the two-dimensional case when the initial boundary of the droplet \(\Gamma_0\) is close to semicircle intersecting the boundary \(\partial \Omega\) of the region containing the alloy orthogonally at two points. The radius of the semi-circle \(\varepsilon\) is assumed to be small, and all the results are valid asymptotically as \(\varepsilon \rightarrow 0_+\). The main result of the paper is to derive (one-dimensional) equations of motion of the centre of the semi-circular bubble, \(s(t) \in \partial \Omega\). This is done in Lemma 3.3, and the final result of the paper is Theorem 5.4, which says that the dynamics on the attractor of the dynamical system defined by the Mullins-Sekerka law of motion is topologically conjugate to the dynamics of the one-dimensional ODE, \[ {ds \over dt} = {8 \over 3\pi} K_s(s), \] where \(K(s)\) is the curvature of the boundary of \(\Omega\) at \(s(t)\). The results are obtained by a careful choice of a coordinate system, expression of all the geometric quantities in this coordinate system, and application of tools of semigroup theory of dissipative dynamical systems.