Related papers: Phase Behavior of Polyelectrolyte Block Copolymers…
We study the motion of dispersed nanoprobes in entangled active-passive polymer mixtures. By comparing the two architectures of linear vs. unconcatenated and unknotted circular polymers, we demonstrate that novel, rich physics emerge. For…
Partitioning of (bio)materials in polymeric mixtures is a key phenomenon both in cellular environments, as well as in industrial applications. In cells, several macromolecules are suspended within different biomolecular phases. On the other…
Tuning the chain-end functionality of a short-chain cationic homopolymer, owing to the nature of the initiator used in the ATRP polymerisation step, can be used to mediate the formation of a gel of this poly(electrolyte) in water. While a…
Systems of hard nonspherical particles exhibit a variety of stable phases with different degrees of translational and orientational order, including isotropic liquid, solid crystal, rotator and a variety of liquid crystal phases. In this…
We investigate the aggregation and phase separation of thin, living T. tubifex worms that behave as active polymers. Randomly dispersed active worms spontaneously aggregate to form compact, highly entangled blobs, a process similar to…
We investigate the temperature dependent phase behaviour of mixtures of poly(Nisopropylacrylamide) (pNIPAM) microgel colloids and a triblock copolymer (PEO-PPO-PEO) surfactant, which undergoes micellisation. Gelation in these systems…
We present an extensive experimental study of birefringence and velocity-gradient components for a series of high molecular weight, flexible, entangled polystyrene solutions subjected to transient start-up flows in a co-rotating two-mill to…
The hydrogen-bonding interpolymer complexation between poly(acrylic acid) (PAA) and the poly(N,N-dimethylacrylamide) (PDMAM) side chains of the negatively charged graft copolymer poly(acrylic acid-co-2-acrylamido-2-methyl-1-propane sulfonic…
DNA is now firmly established as a versatile and robust platform for achieving synthetic nanostructures. While the folding of single molecules into complex structures is routinely achieved through engineering basepair sequences, much less…
Poly(N-isopropylacrylamide)-based microgels are soft colloids undergoing a Volume Phase Transition (VPT) close to ambient temperature. Although widely employed for fundamental research and application purposes, the modifications of the…
The addition of minute amounts of chemically inert polyacrylamide polymer to liquids results in large instabilities under steady electro-osmotic pumping through 2:1 constrictions, demonstrating that laminar flow conditions can be broken in…
This chapter deals with charged polymers (polyelectrolytes) in solution and at surfaces. The behavior of polyelectrolytes is markedly different from that of neutral polymers. In bulk solutions, i.e. disregarding the surface effect, there…
Hydrotropes are substances consisting of amphiphilic molecules that are too small to self assemble in equilibrium structures in aqueous solutions, but can form dynamic molecular clusters H bonded with water molecules. Some hydrotropes, such…
With gradual temperature increase in premelting regions of solid phase of methanol and high pressure phase of ethanol, and using novel procedure of separation of electrode polarization effects, we are able to register the contribution of…
Vesicles self-assembled from amphiphilic diblock copolymers exhibit a wide diversity of behavior upon electroporation, due to competitions between edge, surface and bending energies that drive the system, while different viscous dissipation…
We introduce a new experimental approach to study the structural transitions of large numbers of nanoparticle-coated droplets as their volume is reduced. We use an emulsion system where the dispersed phase is slightly soluble in the…
Cooled oil emulsion droplets in aqueous surfactant solution have been observed to flatten into a remarkable host of polygonal shapes with straight edges and sharp corners, but different driving mechanisms - (i) a partial phase transition of…
We study phase equilibria in a minimal model of charge-regulated polymer solutions. Our model consists of a single polymer species whose charge state arises from protonation-deprotonation processes in the presence of a dissolved acid, whose…
Self-assembly of sphere-forming solution-state amphiphilic diblock copolymers under spherical nanopore confinement is investigated using a simulated annealing technique. For two types of cases of different pore-surface/copolymer…
We investigate the dynamics of the collapse of a single copolymer chain, when the solvent quality is suddenly quenched from good to poor. We employ Brownian dynamics simulations of a bead-spring chain model and incorporate fluctuating…