Related papers: A slow process in confined polymer melts: layer ex…
In this Perspective, I describe recent work on systems in which the traditional distinctions between (i) unentangled vs. well-entangled systems and (ii) melts vs. glasses seem least useful, and argue for the broader use in glassy polymer…
Diffusive transport of small molecules within the internal structures of biological and synthetic material systems is complex because the crowded environment presents chemical and physical barriers to mobility. We explored this mobility…
Using molecular dynamics simulation, we investigate the slow dynamics of a supercooled binary mixture of soft particles interacting with a generalized Hertzian potential. At low density, it displays typical slow dynamics near its glass…
We theoretically investigate the kinetics of the folding transition of a single semiflexible polymer. In the folding transition, the growth rate decrease with an increase in the number of monomers in a collapsed domain, suggesting that the…
Hydrodynamic forces may significantly affect the motion of polymers. In sheet-like cavities, such as the cell's cytoplasm and microfluidic channels, the hydrodynamic forces are long-range. It is therefore expected that that hydrodynamic…
The binary hard-sphere mixture is one of the simplest representations of a many-body system with competing time and length scales. This model is relevant to fundamentally understand both the structural and dynamical properties of materials,…
The relaxation dynamics of glass forming liquids and their structure are influenced in the vicinity of confining walls. In view of the great potential of this effect for applications in those fields of science and industry, where liquids…
A common situation in galactic and intergalactic gas involves cold dense gas in motion relative to hot diffuse gas. Kelvin-Helmholtz instability creates a turbulent mixing layer and populates the intermediate-temperature phase, which often…
We present a theory for the dynamics of a binary mixture with particle size swaps. The theory is based on a factorization approximation similar to that employed in the mode-coupling theory of glassy dynamics. The theory shows that, in…
We study the diffusion of a linear polymer in the presence of permeable membranes without excluded volume interactions, using scaling theory and Monte Carlo simulations. We find that the average time it takes for a chain with polymerization…
In simplified models of glasses we clarify the existence of two different kinds of activated dynamics, which coexist, with one of the two dominating over the other. One is the energy barrier hopping that is typically used to picture…
Using extensive molecular dynamics simulations, we investigate the slowing down of dynamics in a 3D system of ring polymers by varying the ambient pressure and the stiffness of the rings. Our study demonstrates that the stiffness of the…
Performing light scattering experiments we show that introducing short-ranged attraction to a colloidal suspension of nearly hard spheres by addition of free polymer produces new glass transition phenomena. We observe a dramatic…
Large scale molecular dynamics and grand canonical Monte Carlo simulation techniques are used to study the behavior of the interdiffusion of a solvent into an entangled polymer matrix as the state of the polymer changes from a melt to a…
Thin polymer films have attracted attention because of both their broad range of applications and of the fundamental questions they raise regarding the dynamic response of confined polymers. These films are unstable if the temperature is…
We analyze static properties of a strongly confined semiflexible polymer, i.e. either trapped in a closed space or compressed by external forces, in an athermal solvent. Like a flexible polymer case, we can resort to an analogy with the…
Fast slip flow was reported for water inside the interlayer gallery between graphene layers or carbon nanotubes. We report here that this flow rate enhancement (over two orders) breaks down with the presence of chemical functionalization…
Thin polymer films have striking dynamical properties that differ from their bulk counterparts. With the simple geometry of a stepped polymer film on a substrate, we probe mobility above and below the glass transition temperature…
We analyze a dilute suspension of active particles confined between walls and subjected to fields that can modulate particle speed as well as orientation. Generally, the particle distribution is different in the bulk compared to near the…
In cosmological first-order phase transitions, the progress of true-vacuum bubbles is expected to be significantly retarded by the interaction between the bubble wall and the hot plasma. We examine the evolution and collision of slow-moving…