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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Interface fragmentation via horizontal vibration: A pathway to scalable monodisperse emulsification

Linfeng Piao and Anne Juel*

  • Department of Physics and Astronomy and Manchester Centre for Nonlinear Dynamics, School of Natural Sciences, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom

  • *Contact author: anne.juel@manchester.ac.uk
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Phys. Rev. Research 8, L022014 – Published 14 April, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/m3tt-48jx

Abstract

We present a scalable method for producing monodisperse microscale emulsions in a rectangular container holding two stably stratified layers of immiscible liquids by applying horizontal vibration. This setup enables the excitation of a single line of ordered Faraday waves along each end wall when viscous forces dominate interfacial dynamics. Our experiments and theoretical modeling show that the critical nondimensional acceleration for the breakup of the wave tips in a regular array of droplets scales as N−1/2ω*3/2, where N is the kinematic viscosity ratio and ω* is the frequency of forcing on the viscous-capillary scale. The droplet diameter can be easily tuned by varying the forcing parameters, and the number of droplets generated per cycle is proportional to the width of the container.

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Phys. Rev. Research 8, L022014– Published 14 April, 2026
  • Received 10 June 2025
  • Accepted 5 February 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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