Ligament dynamics along unsteady rims

Upon impact on a finite solid surface, a drop first expands into a sheet in the air, surrounded by a rim that destabilizes into ligaments that, in turn, shed secondary droplets. As the sheet expands, the thickness of the rim surrounding it continuously evolves, as do the ligaments that shed fluid from it. The time evolution of the number of ligaments and the distribution of the distances between them is not captured by classical stability analysis. We combine advanced image processing algorithms and theory to elucidate the evolution of the population of ligaments along such unsteady rims.