Diving into the Free Energy: Part 2

 

Get ready to dive into the Free Energy!

If we want to understand phases in cells we need to talk about the Free Energy of a thermodynamic system. This is the second part of the video “Diving into the Free Energy”. In this video, we will understand how thermodynamic mixtures reach equilibrium by minimising the Free Energy. We will see that asking if a mixture will phase-separate or not is the same as asking what is the minimum energy allowed for the mixture. Not only that, but we will also show how the Binodal line on the Phase Diagram directly emerges from the Free Energy!

 

Prepared by Mariona Esquerda Ciutat from the Hyman and Jülicher labs in Dresden.