Related papers: The crystallization of asymmetric patchy models fo…
The protein folding problem must ultimately be solved on all length scales from the atomic up through a hierarchy of complicated structures. By analyzing the stability of the folding process using physics and mathematics, this paper shows…
Understanding protein self-assembly is important for many biological and industrial processes. Proteins can self-assemble into crystals, filaments, gels, and other amorphous aggregates. The final forms include virus capsids and condensed…
Predicting the alignment of non-spherical particles in dense granular flows under shear remains a central challenge in soft matter physics. We demonstrate that the first-order behavior of granular fabric,the anisotropic distribution of…
We report theoretical and simulation studies of phase coexistence in model globular protein solutions, based on short-range, central, pair potential representations of the interaction among macro-particles. After reviewing our previous…
In this perspective we address the question: why are proteins seemingly so hard to crystallize? We suggest that this is because of evolutionary negative design, i.e. proteins have evolved not to crystallize, because crystallization, as with…
The energy for protein folding arises from multiple sources and is not large in total. In spite of the many specific successes of energy landscape and other approaches, there still seems to be some missing guiding factor that explains how…
In this work, we study the effective behavior of a two-dimensional variational model within finite crystal plasticity for high-contrast bilayered composites. Precisely, we consider materials arranged into periodically alternating thin…
X-ray crystallography is the predominant method for obtaining atomic-scale information about biological macromolecules. Despite the success of the technique, obtaining well diffracting crystals still critically limits going from protein to…
Spectral properties of nuclei near the critical point of the quantum phase transition between spherical and axially symmetric shapes are studied in a hybrid collective model which combines the $\gamma$-stable and $\gamma$-rigid collective…
Making use of a simplified model for protein folding, it can be shown that conformations which are particularly stable when their energy is minimized with respect to amino acid sequence (in the sense that they display a large energy gap to…
The original Thomson problem of "spherical crystallography" seeks the ground state of electron shells interacting via the Coulomb potential; however one can also study crystalline ground states of particles interacting with other…
In some cases, solutions to nonlinear PDEs happen to be asymptotically (for large $x$ and/or $t$) invariant under a group $G$ which is not a symmetry of the equation. After recalling the geometrical meaning of symmetries of differential…
We recently introduced a physical model [Hoang et al., P. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA (2004), Banavar et al., Phys. Rev. E (2004)] for proteins which incorporates, in an approximate manner, several key features such as the inherent anisotropy of a…
Patchy colloidal platelets with convex, non-spherical shapes have been realized with different materials at length scales ranging from nanometers to microns. While the assembly of these hard shapes tends to maximize edge-to-edge contacts,…
We use numerical simulations to study the crystallization of monodisperse systems of hard aspherical particles. We find that particle shape and crystallizability can be easily related to each other when particles are characterized in terms…
We investigate the formation of polycrystalline structures in a class of particle systems. The atomistic energy is modeled as a sum of particle energies that favor atoms being locally isometric to a reference lattice. The discrete frame…
The interactions of a protein, its phase behavior, and ultimately, its ability to function, are all influenced by the interactions between the protein and its hydration waters. Here we study proteins with a variety of sizes, shapes,…
The nonlinear propagation of electromagnetic waves in pair plasmas, in which the electrostatic potential plays a very important but subdominant role of a "binding glue" is investigated. Several mechanisms for structure formation are…
In supernova cores and neutron star crusts, nuclei are thought to deform to rodlike and slablike shapes, which are often called nuclear pasta. We study the equilibrium properties of the nuclear pasta by using a liquid drop model with…
We investigated the equilibrium properties of a one-dimensional system of classical particles which interact in pairs through a bounded repulsive potential with a Gaussian shape. Notwithstanding the absence of a proper fluid-solid phase…