Related papers: Life's Solutions are Not Ideal
The quantum theory of fields is largely based on studying perturbations around non-interacting, or free, field theories, which correspond to a collection of quantum-mechanical harmonic oscillators. The quantum theory of an ordinary fluid is…
Understanding realistic complex systems requires confronting significant conceptual, theoretical and experimental limitations rooted in the persistence of views that originated in the mechanics of simple moving bodies. We define the…
The classical approximation may be applied to a number of problems in non-equilibrium field theory. The principles and limits of classical real-time lattice simulations are presented, with particular emphasis on the definition of particle…
Water exchange reactions around ionic solutes are ubiquitous in aqueous solution-phase chemistry. However, the extreme sensitivity of exchange rates to perturbations in the chemistry of an ionic solute is not well understood. We examine…
One of the longest standing open problems in science is how life arises from non-living matter. If it is possible to measure this transition in the lab, then it might be possible to understand the physical mechanisms by which the emergence…
Experimental measurements of interactions in ionic liquids and concentrated electrolytes over the past decade or so have revealed simultaneous monotonic and oscillatory decay modes. These observations have been hard to interpret using…
We examine phase separation in aqueous mixtures at fixed amounts of hydrophilic monovalent ions. When water is the minority component, preferential solvation can stabilize water domains enriched with ions. This ion-induced precipitation…
We discuss some important issues arising from computational efforts in dynamical systems and fluid dynamics. Various individuals have misunderstood these issues since the onset of these problem areas; indeed, they have been routinely…
Our current understanding of the Universe depends on the interplay of several distinct "matter" components, which interact mainly through gravity, and electromagnetic radiation. The nature of the different components, and possible…
Inferring properties of macroscopic solutions from molecular simulations is complicated by the limited size of systems that can be feasibly examined with a computer. When long-ranged electrostatic interactions are involved, the resulting…
By combining methods of kinetic and density functional theory, we present a description of molecular fluids which accounts for their microscopic structure and thermodynamic properties as well as for the hydrodynamic behavior. We focus on…
The path toward the emergence of life in our biosphere involved several key events allowing for the persistence, reproduction and evolution of molecular systems. All these processes took place in a given environmental context and required…
Droplets form a cornerstone of the spatiotemporal organization of biomolecules in cells. These droplets are controlled using physical processes like chemical reactions and imposed gradients, which are costly to simulate using traditional…
Modeling plasmas in terms of atoms or ions is theoretically appealing for several reasons. When it is relevant, the notion of atom or ion in a plasma provides us with an interpretation scheme of the plasma's internal functioning. From the…
Information flow provides a natural measure for the causal interaction between dynamical events. This study extends our previous rigorous formalism of componentwise information flow to the bulk information flow between two complex…
Room temperature ionic liquids (RTILs) are solvent with unusual properties, which are difficult to characterize experimentally because of their intrinsic complexity (large number of atoms, strong Coulomb interactions). Molecular simulations…
This is my attempt to answer Schr\"odinger's question: "What is Life?". In living cell the local combination of atoms is reproduced with incredible accuracy. In the case of protein biosynthesis the notion of the physical aspect of the…
Transport is one of the most important physical processes in all energy and length scales. Ideal gases and hydrodynamics are, respectively, two opposite limits of transport. Here, we present an unexpected mathematical connection between…
High energy heavy ion collisions create quark gluon plasmas that behave like almost perfect fluids. Very similar features to those that led to this insight have also been observed in experimental data from collisions of small systems,…
In view of the wide success of molecular quasi-chemical theory of liquids, this paper develops the soft-cutoff version of that theory. This development has important practical consequences in the common cases that the packing contribution…