Early stages of phase separation from polydisperse polymer mixtures

We study the early stages of phase separation ill a mixture of a polydisperse and a monodisperse polymer within the Cahn-Hilliard framework. We model the polydisperse component using a finite, but arbitrarily large, number of components. and show that the number of components required for convergent behaviour to be achieved is computationally undemanding. We study the growth rate of fluctuations following a quench into the two-phase region of the phase diagram. The q-dependence of the growth rate is shown to he commensurate with the behaviour uf a monodisperse-monodisperse mixture, with the major difference being art effective mobility that is dependent on the quench depth. We also study the deviation of the time dependence of the scattering function from single exponential behaviour.