Related papers: Controlling Secondary Structures of Bio-Polymers w…
Biological systems exploit self-assembly to create complex structures whose arrangements are finely controlled from molecular to mesoscopic level. Herein we report an example of using fully synthetic systems that mimic two levels of…
Microgels are soft colloidal particles constituted by cross-linked polymer networks with a high potential for applications. In particular, after adsorption at a fluid interface, interfacial tension provides two-dimensional (2D) confinement…
We use inverse methods of statistical mechanics to explore trade-offs associated with designing interactions to stabilize self-assembled structures against changes in density or temperature. Specifically, we find isotropic,convex-repulsive…
As an example for the interplay of structure, dynamics, and phase behavior of macromolecular systems, this article focuses on the problem of bottle-brush polymers with either rigid or flexible backbones. On a polymer with chain length…
Nanocomposite materials made of block copolymer and nanoparticles display properties which can be different from the purely polymeric matrix. The resulting material is a crossover of the original properties of the block copolymer and the…
Safe, all-solid-state lithium metal batteries enable high energy density applications, but suffer from instabilities during operation that lead to rough interfaces between the metal and electrolyte and subsequently cause void formation and…
We present a combined experimental and theoretical study on the role of copolymer architecture in the self-assembly of binary PEO-PCL mixtures in water-THF, and show that altering the chain geometry and composition of the copolymers can…
We study the phase behavior of single homopolymers in a simple hydrophobic/hydrophilic off-lattice model with sequence independent local interactions. The specific heat is, not unexpectedly, found to exhibit a pronounced peak well below the…
Linear polymers are represented as chains of hopping reptons and their motion is described as a stochastic process on a lattice. This admittedly crude approximation still catches essential physics of polymer motion, i.e. the universal…
We study two-component bosons on the Harper-Hofstadter model with two legs. The synthetic magnetic fields for the two types of bosons point to either the same direction or opposite directions. The bosons have hardcore intra-species…
Hydrogel consists of a crosslinked polymer matrix imbibed with a solvent such as water at volume fractions that can exceed 90\%. They are important in many scientific and engineering applications due to their tunable physiochemical…
Lattice-model simulations and experiments of some small proteins suggest that folding is essentially controlled by a few conserved contacts. Residues of these conserved contacts form the minimum set of native contacts needed to ensure…
Engineered lattices in condensed matter physics, such as cold atom optical lattices or photonic crystals, can have fundamentally different properties from naturally-occurring electronic crystals. Here, we report a novel type of artificial…
Biopolymers are characterized by heterogeneous interactions, and usually perform their biological tasks forming contacts within domains of limited size. Combining polymer theory with a replica approach, we study the scaling properties of…
Segments with the amino acid sequence EKAYLRT appear in natural occurring proteins both in $\alpha$-helices and $\beta$-sheets. For this reason, we have use this peptide to study how secondary structure formation in proteins depends on the…
Biomembranes are thin capacitors with the unique feature of displaying phase transitions in a physiologically relevant regime. We investigate the voltage and lateral pressure dependence of their capacitance close to their chain melting…
We propose an optical method of shining circularly polarized and spatially periodic laser fields to imprint superlattice structures in two-dimensional electronic systems. By changing the configuration of the optical field, we synthesize…
We study the phase diagram of a system of soft-core dipolar bosons confined to a two-dimensional optical lattice layer. We assume that dipoles are aligned perpendicular to the layer such that the dipolar interactions are purely repulsive…
We consider the transfer of a two-species Bose-Einstein condensate into an optical lattice with a density such that that a Mott-insulator state with one atom per species per lattice site is obtained in the deep lattice regime. Depending on…
Despite their inherent non-equilibrium nature, living systems can self-organize in highly ordered collective states that share striking similarities with the thermodynamic equilibrium phases of conventional condensed matter and fluid…