Related papers: Length scale of dynamic heterogeneity in polymer n…
We report X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy (XPCS) results on a bidimensional (2D) gel formed by a Langmuir monolayer of gold nanoparticles. The system allows an experimental determination of the fourth order time correlation function…
We show how dynamic heterogeneities (DH), a hallmark of glass-forming materials, depend on chain flexibility and chain length in polymers. For highly flexible polymers, a relatively large number of monomers ($N_c\sim500$) undergo correlated…
We report nano-scale mechanical heterogeneity of a metallic glass characterized by dynamic atomic force microscopy. Apparent energy dissipation with the variation of ~12%, originating from non-uniform distribution of local viscoelasticity,…
Over times shorter than that required for relaxation of enthalpy, a liquid can exhibit striking heterogeneities. The picture of these heterogeneities is complex with transient patches of rigidity, irregular yet persistent, intersected by…
Plastic deformation of heterogeneous solid structures is often characterized by random intermittent local plastic events. On the mesoscale this feature can be represented by a spatially fluctuating local yield threshold. Here we study the…
The existence of heterogeneity in the dynamics of supercooled liquids is believed to be one of the hallmarks of the glass transition. Intense research has been carried out in the past to understand the origin of this heterogeneity in…
The interplay of topological constraints, excluded volume interactions, persistence length and dynamical entanglement length in solutions and melts of linear chains and ring polymers is investigated by means of kinetic Monte Carlo…
Mixture quality plays a crucial role in the physical properties of multi-component immiscible polymer mixtures including nanocomposites and polymer blends. Such complex mixtures are often characterized by hierarchical internal structures,…
We present {\it block analysis}, an efficient method to perform finite-size scaling for obtaining the length scale of dynamic heterogeneity and the point-to-set length scale for generic glass-forming liquids. This method involves…
We present dynamic light scattering (DLS) measurements of soft polymethyl-methacrylate (PMMA) and polyacrylamide(PA) polymer gels prepared with trapped bodies (latex spheres or maghemite nanoparticles). We show that the anomalous…
The role of inhomegeneity in determining the properties of correlated electron systems is poorly understood because of the dearth of structural probes of disorder at the nanoscale. Advances in both neutron and x-ray scattering…
We developed a microscope intended to probe, using a parallel heterodyne receiver, the fluctuation spectrum of light quasi-elastically scattered by gold nanoparticles diffusing in viscous fluids. The cutoff frequencies of the recorded…
Optical properties of polymer capped gold nanoparticles of various sizes (diameter 3-6 nm) have been studied. We present a new scheme to extract size dependent variation of total dielectric function of gold nanoparticles from measured…
Dynamical heterogeneities have been introduced in the context of the glass transition of molecular liquids and the lengthscale associated with them has been argued to be at the origin of the observed quasi-universal behaviour of glassy…
Using non-contact scanning probe microscopy (SPM) techniques, dielectric properties were studied on 50 nanometer length scales in poly-vinyl-acetate (PVAc) films in the vicinity of the glass transition. Low frequency (1/f) noise observed in…
In recent years, fluorescence correlation spectroscopy has been increasingly applied for the study of polymer dynamics on the nanometer scale. The core idea is to extract, from a measured autocorrelation curve, an effective mean-square…
Graphene-based nanostructured systems and van-der-Waals heterostructures comprise a material class of growing technological and scientific importance. Joining materials with vastly different properties, polymer-graphene heterosystems…
The presence of nanoparticles in a diblock copolymer leads to changes in the morphology and properties of the matrix and can produce highly organized hybrid materials. The resulting material properties depend not only on the polymer…
In this work we numerically investigate a new method for the characterization of growing length scales associated with spatially heterogeneous dynamics of glass-forming liquids. This approach, motivated by the formulation of the…
Monte Carlo simulations of coarse-grained polymers provide a useful tool to deepen the understanding of conformational and statistical properties of polymers both in physical as well as in biological systems. In this study we sample compact…