Universal behavior of nonequilibrium fluctuations in free diffusion processes

Abstract

We show that giant nonequilibrium fluctuations are present during the free diffusive remixing occurring in ordinary liquid mixtures and in macromolecular solutions. The static structure factor of the fluctuations is measured by using a quantitative shadowgraph technique. We show that structure factors at different times and from different samples can be rescaled onto a single master curve without any adjustable parameter, thus giving strong evidence that nonequilibrium fluctuations are a universal feature of free diffusion processes.