Universality in fluid domain coarsening: The case of vapor-liquid transition

Domain growth during the kinetics of phase separation is studied following vapor-liquid transition in a single component Lennard-Jones fluid. Results are analyzed after appropriately mapping the continuum snapshots obtained from extensive molecular-dynamics simulations to a simple cubic lattice. For near-critical quench interconnected domain morphology is observed. A brief period of slow diffusive growth is followed by a linear viscous hydrodynamic growth that lasts for an extended period of time. This result is in contradiction with earlier reports of late-time growth exponent 1/2 that questions the uniqueness of the non-equilibrium universality for liquid-liquid and vapor-liquid transitions