A useful schematic is the upper critical solution temperature form of a binodal: a dome in temperature versus chromatin concentration. Below the dome, an intermediate overall concentration separates into a dilute phase and a chromatin-rich phase; above it the liquid is homogeneous. At a fixed temperature, the two intersections of a horizontal tie line give the compositions of the coexisting phases, not the concentrations of two different initial samples.
Figure 1.
Schematic upper-critical-solution-temperature model for chromatin demixing and weaker attraction at lower salt
. Details.
The diagram is a model, not measured phase-boundary data. The stated observation at one salt concentration does not by itself establish whether heating suppresses or promotes demixing. A lower critical solution temperature system would instead demix on heating, and would need the corresponding inverted geometry. The following answers make the usual enthalpically favourable-demixing assumption explicit.
For a symmetric Flory-Huggins polymer blend, the mixing free energy per lattice site is
The critical conditions and give and . Therefore
Since , heating improves miscibility: this is an upper critical solution temperature in the stipulated model. The very high value is an extrapolation of the supplied interaction-parameter fit, not evidence that an intact experimental blend can be brought reversibly to this temperature; chemical stability and the fitted temperature range must be checked before interpreting it as an accessible transition.
At , and , well into strong segregation. For the polymer-blend interface width, state the convention explicitly. In the equal-segment, long-chain square-gradient approximation,
Its first integral gives , so
The inverse-central-slope width is consequently
A convention calling the hyperbolic-tangent scale itself the width instead quotes ; these describe the same profile. The predicted interface spans only a few statistical segments, so the continuum approximation for gradients is quantitatively marginal. Intrinsic composition width and experimentally broadened width also differ because roughness and finite spatial resolution can broaden a measured profile.