Related papers: Fluctuation force exerted by a planar self-avoidin…
The extrusion of polymer melts is known to be susceptible to `melt fracture' instabilities, which can deform the extrudate, or cause it to break entirely. Motivated by this, we consider the impact that the recently discovered polymer…
Spherical confinement can act either stabilizing or destabilizing on the collapsed state of a semi-flexible polymer. General free-energy arguments suggest that the order of the unconstrained collapse transition is the distinguishing factor:…
Although Casimir forces are inseparable from their fluctuations, little is known about these fluctuations in soft matter systems. We use the membrane stress tensor to study the fluctuations of the membrane-mediated Casimir-like force. This…
The generalized elastic model encompasses several physical systems such as polymers, membranes, single file systems, fluctuating surfaces and rough interfaces. We consider the case of an applied localized potential, namely an external force…
The thermally assisted detachment of a self-avoiding polymer chain from an adhesive surface by an external force applied to one of the chain ends is investigated. We perform our study in the "fixed height" statistical ensemble where one…
We follow the dynamics of an ensemble of interacting self-propelled semi-flexible polymers in contact with a thermal bath. We characterize structure and dynamics of the passive system and as a function of the motor activity. We find that…
The non-equilibrium structural and dynamical properties of a flexible polymer tethered to a reflecting wall and subject to oscillatory linear flow are studied by numerical simulations. Polymer is confined in two dimensions and is modeled as…
We present a systematic statistical mechanical analysis of the conformational properties of a stiff polyelectrolyte chain with intrachain attractions that are due to counterion correlations. We show that the mean-field solution corresponds…
We theoretically study the phenomenon of self-propulsion through Casimir forces in thermal non-equilibrium. Using fluctuational electrodynamics, we derive a formula for the self-propulsion force for an arbitrary small object in two…
A uniformly moving inclusion which locally suppresses the fluctuations of a classical thermally excited field is shown to experience a drag force which depends on the dynamics of the field. It is shown that in a number of cases the linear…
We study universal aspects of polymer conformations and transverse fluctuations for a single swollen chain characterized by a contour length $L$ and a persistence length $\ell_p$ in two dimensions (2D) and in three dimensions (3D) in the…
We study the scaling properties of self-flattening surfaces under global suppression on surface fluctuations. Evolution of self-flattening surfaces is described by restricted solid-on-solid type monomer deposition-evaporation model with…
Lipid membranes constitute very particular materials: on the one hand, they break very easily under microscopical stretching; on the other hand, they are extremely flexible, presenting deformations even at small scales. Consequently, a…
We describe some recent results concerning the statistical properties of a self-interacting polymer stretched by an external force. We concentrate mainly on the cases of purely attractive or purely repulsive self-interactions, but our…
Elastic turbulence is the chaotic fluid motion resulting from elastic instabilities due to the addition of polymers in small concentrations at very small Reynolds ($\mbox{Re}$) numbers. Our direct numerical simulations show that elastic…
While techniques to compute thermal fluctuation induced, or pseudo-Casimir, forces in equilibrium systems are well established, the same is not true for non-equilibrium cases. We present a general formalism that allows us to unambiguously…
Translocation dynamics of an active semi-flexible polymer through a nano-pore into a rigid two dimensional circular cavity, and the polymer packing dynamics have been studied by using Langevin dynamics (LD) simulations. The results show…
This paper examines the effect of cooling on disentanglement forces in polymers and the implications for both single chain pullout and polymer dynamics. I derive the explicit dependence of the distribution of these forces on temperature,…
We investigate theoretically the near-wall region in elastic turbulence of a dilute polymer solution in the limit of large Weissenberg number. As it was established experimentally, elastic turbulence possesses a boundary layer where the…
The translocation of a polymer through a pore in a membrane separating fluids of different viscosities is studied via several computational approaches. Starting with the polymer halfway, we find that as a viscosity difference across the…