Related papers: Dynamic Arrest in Polymer Melts: Competition betwe…
We analyze the displacements of the particles of a glass-forming molecular liquid perpendicular to a confining solid surface, using extensive molecular dynamics simulations with atomistic models. In the vicinity of an attractive surface,…
The characterization of the interactions between two fully flexible self-avoiding polymers is one of the classic and most important problems in polymer physics. In this paper we measure these interactions in the presence of active…
Biomolecular condensates play a crucial role in the spatial organization of living matter. These membrane-less organelles, resulting from liquid-liquid phase separation, operate far from thermodynamic equilibrium, with their size and…
Understanding the physics of glass formation remains one of the major unsolved challenges of condensed matter science. As a material solidifies into a glass, it exhibits a spectacular slowdown of the dynamics upon cooling or compression,…
Poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) is a synthetic polymer that is widely studied for its thermoresponsive character. However, recent works also reported evidence of a low temperature (protein-like) dynamical transition around 225 K in…
Molecular dynamics simulations were conducted to investigate the structural properties of melts of nonconcatenated ring polymers and compared to melts of linear polymers. The longest rings were composed of N=1600 monomers per chain which…
Understanding how entanglements affect the behaviour of polymeric complex fluids is an open challenge in many fields. To elucidate the nature and consequence of entanglements in dense polymer solutions, we propose a novel method: a…
We analyze structural and conformational properties in a simulated bead-spring model of a non-entangled, supercooled polymer melt. We explore the statics of the model via various structure factors, involving not only the monomers, but also…
Polymer blends consisting of two or more polymers are important for a wide variety of industries and processes, but, the precise mechanism of their thermomechanical behaviour is incompletely understood. In order to understand clearly, it is…
Dynamical clustering represents a characteristic feature of active matter consisting of self-propelled agents that convert energy from the environment into mechanical motion. At the micron scale, typical of overdamped dynamics, particles…
Extending mode-coupling theory, we elaborate a microscopic theory for the glass transition of liquids confined between two parallel flat hard walls. The theory contains the standard MCT equations in bulk and in two dimensions as limiting…
The glass transition GT is usually thought of as a structural arrest that occurs during the cooling of a liquid, or sometimes a plastic crystal, trapping a metastable state of the system before it can recrystallize to stabler forms1. This…
We study of the dynamics of ring polymers confined to diffuse in a background gel at low concentrations. We do this in order to probe the inter-play between topology and dynamics in ring polymers. We develop an algorithm that takes into…
The internal dynamics of active gels, both in artificial (in-vitro) model systems and inside the cytoskeleton of living cells, has been extensively studied by experiments of recent years. These dynamics are probed using tracer particles…
We show that a fluid under strong spatially periodic confinement displays a glass transition within mode-coupling theory (MCT) at a much lower density than the corresponding bulk system. We use fluctuating hydrodynamics, with confinement…
We present computer simulations of concentrated solutions of unknotted nonconcatenated semiflexible ring polymers. Unlike in their flexible counterparts, shrinking involves a strong energetic penalty, favoring interpenetration and…
We present simulations on a binary blend of bead-spring polymer chains. The introduction of monomer size disparity yields very different relaxation times for each component of the blend. Competition between two different arrest mechanisms,…
Transitions between solid-like and fluid-like states in living tissues have been found in steps of embryonic development and in stages of disease progression. Our current understanding of these transitions has been guided by experimental…
Soft matter materials and polymers are widely used in the controlled delivery of drugs. Simulation and modeling provide insight at the atomic scale enabling a level of control unavailable to experiments. We present a workflow protocol for…
We use computer simulations to study the (driven) dynamics of a charged polymer in a disordered medium, thus mimicking the setting used in gel electrophoresis. In agreement with experiments, we find that inside the gel the mobility of the…