Ostwald Ripening in Systems with Competing Interactions

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Abstract
We study the effects of a long-range repulsive interaction on the classical coarsening mechanism of Lifshitz and Slyozov. Beginning with a Langevin description, a set of interface equations describing both the growth and motion of droplets is derived and solved numerically. We study two regimes: in one, the system reaches hexagonal order and the droplet distribution function becomes a delta function; in the other, the system is disordered and polydisperse with a strong coupling between the position and the size of the droplets.