Related papers: Active Polymers Confer Fast Reorganization Kinetic…
Partitioning of (bio)materials in polymeric mixtures is a key phenomenon both in cellular environments, as well as in industrial applications. In cells, several macromolecules are suspended within different biomolecular phases. On the other…
The impact of impenetrable obstacles on the energetics and equilibrium structure of strongly repulsive directed polymers is investigated. As a result of the strong interactions, regions of severe polymer depletion and excess are found in…
Inspired by how the shape deformations in active organisms help them to migrate through disordered porous environments, we simulate active ring polymers in two-dimensional random porous media. Flexible and inextensible active ring polymers…
We enumerate all minimal energy packings (MEPs) for small single linear and ring polymers composed of spherical monomers with contact attractions and hard-core repulsions, and compare them to corresponding results for monomer packings. We…
Activity and autonomous motion are fundamental in living and engineering systems. This has stimulated the new field of active matter in recent years, which focuses on the physical aspects of propulsion mechanisms, and on motility-induced…
Similarly-charged polymers in solution, known as polyelectrolytes, are known to form aggregated structures in the presence of oppositely charged counterions. Understanding the dependence of the equilibrium phases and the dynamics of the…
We show that a viscoelastic thin sheet driven out of equilibrium by active structural remodelling develops a rich variety of shapes as a result of a competition between viscous relaxation and activity. In the regime where active processes…
Macroscale robotic systems have demonstrated great capabilities of high speed, precise, and agile functions. However, the ability of soft robots to perform complex tasks, especially in centimeter and millimeter scale, remains limited due to…
Analogous to a model that predicts the linear scaling of the binding energy of a nucleus from the number of nucleons, a simple model was developed to account for the observed linear variation of the quantum-chemically computed total…
The cytoskeleton, consisting of biopolymer filaments, molecular motors, and passive crosslinking proteins, provides the internal structure of cells that facilitate movement, growth, and cell division. Understanding the microscopic…
We theoretically study mixtures of chemically-interacting particles, which produce or consume a chemical to which they are attracted or repelled, in the most general case of many coexisting species. We find a new class of active phase…
We analyze the nonequilibrium dynamics of single inextensible semiflexible biopolymers as stretching forces are applied at the ends. Based on different (contradicting) heuristic arguments, various scaling laws have been proposed for the…
Of all complex fluids, it is probably the rheology of polymers we understand best. In-depth insight into the entanglement and reptation of individual polymers allows us to predict for instance the shear-thinning rheology and the behaviour…
Spontaneous self-assembly in molecular systems is a fundamental route to both biological and engineered soft matter. Simple micellisation, emulsion formation, and polymer mixing principles are well understood. However, the principles behind…
The critical incompatibility of polymers with different compositions scales inversely with their length. For instance, a mixture of A and B homopolymers of length $N$ segregates at $\chi_{AB}^{cr} = 2/N$. But what if the difference between…
A variety of computational models have been developed to describe active matter at different length and time scales. The diversity of the methods and the challenges in modeling active matter---ranging from molecular motors and cytoskeletal…
We study the motion of dispersed nanoprobes in entangled active-passive polymer mixtures. By comparing the two architectures of linear vs. unconcatenated and unknotted circular polymers, we demonstrate that novel, rich physics emerge. For…
We study the viscoelastic properties of highly entangled, flexible, self-propelled polymers using Brownian dynamics simulations. Our results show that the active motion of the polymer increases the height of the stress plateau by orders of…
Filamentous cyanobacteria can show fascinating examples of nonequilibrium self-organization, which however are not well-understood from a physical perspective. We investigate the motility and collective organization of colonies of these…
We present a new simulation technique to study systems of polymers functionalized by reactive sites that bind/unbind forming reversible linkages. Functionalized polymers feature self-assembly and responsive properties that are unmatched by…