Preservation of droplet collision history in phase separation of a binary fluid mixture

Phase-separation phenomena are widely observed in various kinds of condensed matter. The common feature of these phenomena is the coarsening of a phase-separation pattern driven by the interfacial energy associated with the phase boundary, In contrast to the general phenomenology of liquid-liquid phase separation in which the memory of the structure is continuously lost with time upon coarsening, we have found an unusual phase-separation morphology that records the full history of pattern evolution fur a liquid mixture. The collision history preserved in the trajectory pattern of each droplet demonstrates a strong spatial-temporal correlation in the structural development.