A single length scale rules ballistic aggregation: travels of a droplet train

Ballistic aggregation is a canonical non-equilibrium process, relevant across scales from granular gases to planetary accretion.

Collisions are driven by differences in velocities, building up persistent correlations between neighbors.

Here, we provide the first experimental realization of one-dimensional ballistic aggregation in a train of droplets formed by the breakup of a liquid jet.

Experiments and simulations confirm the analytically predicted scaling, with the global process shown to be governed by a single length scale.

While air drag inverts the sign of neighbor velocity correlations, a 1D ordering constraint protects bulk characteristics of ballistic aggregation such as the scaling exponent and the shape of the large mass tail.

More broadly, our results show that Smoluchowski-like mean-field descriptions fail when collisions carry directional memory -- as demonstrated here for jet-generated sprays.