Related papers: Polymer-Enforced Crystallization of a Eutectic Bin…
Although the concept of random close packing with an almost universal packing fraction of ~ 0.64 for hard spheres was introduced more than half a century ago, there are still ongoing debates. The main difficulty in searching the densest…
We study theoretically and numerically the elastic properties of hard sphere glasses, and provide a real-space description of their mechanical stability. In contrast to repulsive particles at zero-temperature, we argue that the presence of…
We show in numerical simulations that a system of two coupled replicas of a binary mixture of hard spheres undergoes a phase transition in equilibrium at a density slightly smaller than the glass transition density for an unreplicated…
A versatile system to construct polymeric phononic crystals by using ultrasound is described. In order to fabricate this material a customised cavity device fitted with a 2 MHz acoustic transducer and an acoustic reflector is employed for…
Recently we found that when conventional bulk polycrystalline piezoceramics discs (~ 10 mm diameter) are thinned down to thickness ~ 200 microns or below, the measured unipolar electrostrain (UES) values increased phenomenally…
The structure of spherical micelles of the diblock copolymer poly(styrene-block-acrylic acid) in water was investigated with small angle neutron scattering (SANS) and contrast matching. We have monitored inter-micelle correlation and the…
We consider a coarse-grained model in which polymers under good-solvent conditions are represented by soft spheres whose radii, which should be identified with the polymer radii of gyrations, are allowed to fluctuate. The corresponding pair…
We report the formation of colloidal complexes resulting from the electrostatic co-assembly between anionic surfactants and cationic polyelectrolytes or block copolymers. Combining light and x-ray scattering experiments with cryogenic…
We perform extensive numerical simulations of a paradigmatic model glass former, the hard-sphere fluid with 10% polydispersity. We sample from the ensemble of trajectories with fixed observation time, whereby single trajectories are…
The freezing mechanism, recently suggested for a monodisperse hard-disk fluid [Huerta et al., Phys. Rev. E, 2006, 74, 061106] is extended here to an equimolar binary hard-disk mixtures. We are showing that for diameter ratios, smaller than…
The phase behaviour of a single large semiflexible polymer immersed in a suspension of spherical particles is studied. All interactions are simple excluded volume interactions and the diameter of the spherical particles is an order of…
Particulate reinforcement of polymeric matrices is a powerful technique for tailoring the mechanical and degradation properties of bioresorbable implant materials. Dispersion of inorganic particles is critical to achieving optimal…
We study an air-fluidized granular monolayer, composed of plastic spheres which roll on a metallic grid. The air current is adjusted so that the spheres never loose contact with the grid, so that the dynamics may be regarded as pseudo…
A simple analytic theory for mixtures of hard spheres and larger polymers with excluded volume interactions is developed. The mixture is shown to exhibit extensive immiscibility. For large polymers with strong excluded volume interactions,…
Polymeric particles are strong candidates for designing artificial materials capable of emulating the complex twisting-based functionality observed in biological systems. In this letter, we provide the first detailed investigation of the…
The shape of biological shells, such as cell nuclei, membranes, and vesicles, often deviates from a perfect sphere due to an interplay of complex interactions with a myriad of molecular structures. In particular, semiflexible biopolymers…
The formation of (bio)molecular condensates via liquid-liquid phase separation in cells has received increasing attention, as these coacervates play important functional and regulatory roles within biological systems. However, the majority…
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,…
Using a geometry-based fundamental measure density functional theory, we calculate bulk fluid phase diagrams of colloidal mixtures of vanishingly thin hard circular platelets and hard spheres. We find isotropic-nematic phase separation with…
We study the interplay between the fluid-crystal transition and the glass transition of elastic sphere system with polydispersity using nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations. It is found that the end point of the crystal-fluid…