Related papers: Universal features of polymer shapes in crowded en…
A brief review of our recent studies aiming at a better understanding of the scaling behaviour of polymers in disordered environments is given. The main emphasis is on a simple generic model where the polymers are represented by…
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 investigate the conformations of a semiflexible polymer confined to a square box. Results of Monte Carlo simulations show the existence of a shape transition when the persistence length of the polymer becomes comparable to the dimensions…
The adsorption of a single ideal polymer chain on energetically heterogeneous and rough surfaces is investigated using a variational procedure introduced by Garel and Orland (Phys. Rev. B 55 (1997), 226). The mean polymer size is calculated…
We analyse scaling laws that govern macromolecules of different topology: polymer chains, homogeneous and miktoarm star polymers in a good solvent possibly constrained by a porous medium. The latter is modelled by long-range-correlated…
We consider a linear polymer chain in a disordered environment modeled by percolation clusters on a square lattice. The disordered environment is meant to roughly represent molecular crowding as seen in cells. The model may be viewed as the…
We present a field-theoretic renormalization group analysis of a polymer chain immersed in a binary good solvent close to its critical demixing point. We first show that this problem can be mapped on a bicritical field theory, i.e. a…
Over the past two decades polymer nanocomposites have received tremendous interest from industry and academia due to their advanced properties comparative to polymer blends. Many computational studies have revealed that the macroscopic…
We present a general analysis of the field theoretical properties which guarantee the recovery, at the renormalized level, of symmetries broken by regularization. We also discuss the anomalous case.
We present results from molecular dynamics simulations of a spherically confined neutral polymer in the presence of crowding agents, studying polymer shapes and conformations as a function of the confining potential, solvent quality and the…
Macromolecular crowding can influence polymer shapes, which is important for understanding the thermodynamic stability of polymer solutions and the structure and function of biopolymers (proteins, RNA, DNA) under confinement. We explore the…
Molecular dynamics simulation of a generic polymer model is applied to study melts of polymers with different types of intrinsic stiffness. Important static observables of the single chain such as gyration radius or persistence length are…
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…
. We consider three dimensional model of the Gaussian polymer chain in the presence of defects to understand the formation of a polymer aggregate where the aggregate is induced by the defects. The defects are acting as an attractive centres…
We analyze the universal conformational properties of complex copolymer macromolecules, based on two topologies: the rosette structure containing $f_c$ linear branches and $f_r$ closed loops grafted to the central core, and the symmetric…
Mesoscale behavior of polymers is frequently described by universal laws. This physical property motivates us to propose a new modeling concept, grouping polymers into classes with a common long-wavelength representation. In the same class…
The structure and function of polymers in confined environments, e.g., biopolymers in the cytoplasm of a cell, are strongly affected by macromolecular crowding. To explore the influence of solvent quality on conformations of crowded…
We characterize universal features of the sample-to-sample fluctuations of global geometrical observables, such as the area, width, length, and center-of-mass position, in random growing planar clusters. Our examples are taken from…
Depletion-induced interactions between colloids in colloid-polymer mixtures depend in range and strength on size, shape, and concentration of depletants. Crowding by colloids in turn affects shapes of polymer coils, such as biopolymers in…
In this paper we study the shape characteristics of star-like polymers in various solvent quality using a mesoscopic level of modeling. The dissipative particle dynamics simulations are performed for the homogeneous and four different…