Chemical gardens are self‑assembled structures of semi‑permeable precipitates. They attract significant interest due to their relevance to sub‑oceanic hydrothermal vents and the origin of life.
A group of researchers including PhD student Mingchuan Zheng and professor Alex Routh have run new experiments to investigate the growth behaviour of chemical garden walls in a horizontal Hele‑Shaw cell. The experiments have shown that that the growth of the chemical garden walls can be described by a simple, diffusion‑controlled dynamical model until their eventual osmotic fracture at a reproducible time. This provides a basis by which wall growth in more complex chemical garden systems can be characterised.
A paper illustrating the key results of this work has been recently published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, and is available here.
On the growth of chemical gardens
