Related papers: Polymers as compressible soft spheres
Structural and thermodynamic consistency of coarse-graining models across multiple length scales is essential for the predictive role of multi-scale modeling and molecular dynamic simulations that use mesoscale descriptions. Our approach is…
Understanding the dynamics of soft colloids, such as star polymers, dendrimers, and microgels, is of scientific and practical importance. It is known that the excluded volume effect plays a key role in colloidal dynamics. Here, we propose a…
We present a simple, and physically motivated, coarse-grained model of a lipid bilayer, suited for micron scale computer simulations. Each ~25 nm^2 patch of bilayer is represented by a spherical particle. Mimicking forces of hydrophobic…
The most efficient way to pack equally sized spheres isotropically in 3D is known as the random close packed state, which provides a starting point for many approximations in physics and engineering. However, the particle size distribution…
We develop a model to describe the properties of random assemblies of polydisperse hard spheres. We show that the key features to describe the system are (i) the dependence between the free volume of a sphere and the various coordination…
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…
A coarse-graining strategy for dilute and semi-dilute solutions of interacting polymers, and of colloid polymer mixtures is briefly described. Monomer degrees of freedom are traced out to derive an effective, state dependent pair potential…
We use existing 3D Discrete Element simulations of simple shear flows of spheres to evaluate the radial distribution function at contact that enables kinetic theory to correctly predict the pressure and the shear stress, for different…
Solutions of interacting linear polymers are mapped onto a system of ``soft'' spherical particles interacting via an effective pair potential. This coarse-graining reduces the individual monomer-level description to a problem involving only…
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,…
The depletion interactions between two colloidal plates or between two colloidal spheres, induced by interacting polymers in a good solvent, are calculated theoretically and by computer simulations. A simple analytical theory is shown to be…
The surface tension of interacting polymers in a good solvent is calculated theoretically and by computer simulations for a planar wall geometry and for the insertion of a single colloidal hard-sphere. This is achieved for the planar wall…
Theories for the effective polarisability of a small particle in a medium are presented using different levels of approximation: we consider the virtual cavity, real cavity and the hard-sphere models as well as a continuous interpolation of…
Soft nanocomposites represent both a theoretical and an experimental challenge due to the high number of the microscopic constituents that strongly influence the behaviour of the systems. An effective theoretical description of such systems…
Using small-angle neutron scattering and liquid integral equation theory, we relate the structure factor of flexible dendrimers of 4th generation to their average shape. The shape is measured as a radial density profile of monomers…
We study the dynamics and conformation of polymers composed by active monomers. By means of Brownian dynamics simulations we show that when the direction of the self-propulsion of each monomer is aligned with the backbone, the polymer…
A brief review of modeling and simulation methods for a study of polymers at interfaces is provided. When studying truly multiscale problems as provided by realistic polymer systems, coarse graining is practically unavoidable. In this…
We consider three different continuum polymer models, that all depend on a tunable parameter r that determines the strength of the excluded-volume interactions. In the first model chains are obtained by concatenating hard spherocylinders of…
We investigate pores in fluid membranes by molecular dynamics simulations of an amphiphile-solvent mixture, using a molecular coarse-grained model. The amphiphilic membranes self-assemble into a lamellar stack of amphiphilic bilayers…
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…