Tania Aubelle

Two ball chains (the kind you find on light switches or inside toilets) are shaken on a square horizontal plate. The shaking provides something like temperature and the chains are something like 2D self-avoiding polymers. The two chains are each 709cm long and identical except that they are colored red and blue. After a while, they exhibit a kind of phase separation in which they each occupy non-overlapping regions of the plate. This is supposed to be an entropic effect: there are more separated configurations than mixed ones. The shaking frequency was 20Hz. The pictures are taken 5s apart and animated at 10fps, so each second of the movie is 50 seconds of real time.

L'une des chaînes se sépare de l'autre pour former en son sein une spirale ressemblant à une "gouttelette".