Related papers: Depletion theory and the precipitation of protein …
A theory of nonlinear convective depletion is set up as a nanosphere translates fast through a semidilute polymer solution. For nanospheres a self-consistent field theory in the Rouse approximation is often legitimate. A self-similar…
The behavior of mesoscopic particles dissolved in a dilute solution of long, flexible, and nonadsorbing polymer chains is studied by field-theoretic methods. For spherical and cylindrical particles the solvation free energy for immersing a…
Field-theoretical method is efficient in predicting the assembling structures of polymeric systems. However, for the polymer/nanoparticle mixture, the continuous density description is not suitable to capture the realistic assembly of…
The dynamics of polymer-nanoparticle (NP) mixtures, which involves multiple scales and system-specific variables, has posed a long-standing challenge on its theoretical description. In this paper, we construct a microscopic theory for…
The structural and thermodynamic properties of mixtures of colloidal spheres and non-adsorbing polymer chains are studied within a novel general two-component macromolecular liquid state approach applicable for all size asymmetry ratios.…
The depletion interactions between two colloidal plates or between two colloidal spheres, induced by interacting polymers in a good solvent, are calculated theoretically and by computer simulations. A simple analytical theory is shown to be…
Depletion forces and macromolecular crowding govern the structure and function of biopolymers in biological cells and the properties of polymer nanocomposite materials. To isolate and analyze the influence of polymer shape fluctuations and…
We discuss structural correlations in mixtures of free polymer and colloidal particles based on a microscopic, 2-component liquid state integral equation theory. Whereas in the case of polymers much smaller than the spherical particles the…
We propose a continuum theory to model the Mullins effect, which is ubiquitously observed in polymer composites. In the theory, the softening of the materials during the stretching process is accounted for by considering the delamination of…
The depletion force and depletion potential between two in principle unequal "big" hard spheres embedded in a multicomponent mixture of "small" hard spheres are computed using the Rational Function Approximation method for the structural…
The structural properties of polymers adsorbed onto a surface have been widely investigated using self-consistent mean-field theories. Recently, analytical mean-field theories have been applied to study polymer adsorption on curved surfaces…
We use thermodynamic perturbation theory to calculate the free energies and resulting phase diagrams of binary systems of spherical colloidal particles and interacting polymer coils in good solvent within an effective one-component…
We consider a mean-field model of a polymer with a spherically-symmetric finitely supported potential. We describe how the typical size of the polymer depends on the two parameters: the temperature, which approaches the critical value, and…
The paper presents a short overview of the theoretical, numerical and experimental works on the critical behavior of a dilute polymer solution of long-flexible polymer chains confined in semi-infinite space restricted by a surface or in a…
We propose a field-theoretical approach to a polymer system immersed in an ideal mixture of clustering centers. The system contains several species of these clustering centers with different functionality, each of which connects a fixed…
The decay of an excited atom in the presence of a medium that both scatters and absorbs radiation is studied with the help of a quantum-electrodynamical model. The medium is represented by a half space filled with a randomly distributed set…
The surface tension, the adsorption, and the depletion thickness of polymers close to a single nonadsorbing colloidal sphere are computed by means of Monte Carlo simulations. We consider polymers under good-solvent conditions and in the…
The depletion potential between two hard spheres in a solvent of thin hard disclike platelets is investigated by using either the Derjaguin approximation or density functional theory. Particular attention is paid to the density dependence…
We consider the problem of an ideal polymer confined in a droplet. When the droplet radius is smaller than the (unconfined) polymer radius of gyration, the polymer entropy will depend on the droplet shape. We compute the resulting surface…
A versatile new approach for calculating the depletion potential in a hard sphere mixture is presented. This is valid for any number of components and for arbitrary densities. We describe two different routes to the depletion potential for…