Spatiotemporal Quantification of Multiphase Systems

The strategic integration of multiple phases is often engineered to counteract the intrinsic limitations of single-phase systems, significantly enhancing electronic, ionic, and photonic mobility, mechanic or fluidic characteristics, and mass transport. Despite these advancements, related complex fluids, such as emulsions and foams have not been comprehensively investigated <i>in situ</i>, which restricts time-dependent mechanistic studies. High-resolution microscopy and ultra-fast detection provide insights into the spatial and temporal domains, respectively. However, they sacrifice features in the other domain and, therefore cannot explore the inherent connection to spatiotemporal and dynamics features of co-existing multi-phases. High-throughput technologies for spatiotemporal visualization and quantification are promising but remain largely underdeveloped. To address this gap, we have recently developed a visualization platform employing high-throughput light polarization matrix detection combined with photonic partial coherence. This platform is specifically designed to visualize and quantify the dynamic chemical and physical processes occurring at interfaces between gases, liquids, and solids with an unprecedented spatiotemporal resolution (1 µm and 1 µs). It enables precise mapping and quantification of complex fluids relevant to mechanical/electrical, biomedical/bio-engineering components, and living matter such as plant extracts and bacterial growth. By integrating the spatiotemporal equivalence of photon cluster dynamics with partial coherence detection, we further extend the scattering signals from the interfaces as spatiotemporal voxel-resolved matrix decompositions, which improve the generality of the platform and related quantifications for different multiphase systems. Overall, this study is the first attempt to use light-polarization for high-throughput spatiotemporal description of multiphase systems.