Related papers: Entropically Patchy Particles: Engineering Valence…
Modeling membrane interactions with arbitrarily shaped colloidal particles, such as environmental micro- and nanoplastics, at the cell scale remains particularly challenging, owing to the complexity of particle geometries and the need to…
Entangled matter displays unusual and attractive properties and mechanisms: tensile strength, capabilities for assembly and disassembly, damage tolerance. While some of the attributes and mechanisms share some traits with traditional…
Entanglement entropy appears as a central property of quantum systems in broad areas of physics. However, its precise value is often sensitive to unknown microphysics, rendering it incalculable. By considering parametric dependence on…
We present a statistical mechanical description of randomly packed spherical particles, where the average coordination number is treated as a macroscopic thermodynamic variable. The overall packing entropy is shown to have two…
Co-assembly of inorganic nanoparticles (NPs) and nanostructured polymer matrix represents an intricate interplay of enthalpic or entropic forces. Particle size largely affects the phase behavior of the nanocomposite. Theoretical studies…
Particle stabilized emulsions have received an enormous interest in the recent past, but our understanding of the dynamics of emulsion formation is still limited. For simple spherical particles, the time dependent growth of fluid domains is…
The statistical-mechanical study of the equilibrium properties of fluids, starting from the knowledge of the interparticle interaction potential, is essential to understand the role that microscopic interaction between individual particles…
The surprising recent discoveries of quasicrystals and their approximants in soft matter systems poses the intriguing possibility that these structures can be realized in a broad range of nano- and micro-scale assemblies. It has been…
Inverse design can be a useful strategy for discovering interactions that drive particles to spontaneously self-assemble into a desired structure. Here, we extend an inverse design methodology--relative entropy optimization--to determine…
We critically discuss the application of the Wertheim's theory to classes of complex associating fluids that can be today engineered in the laboratory as patchy colloids and to the prediction of their peculiar gas-liquid phase diagrams. Our…
Open structures can display a number of unusual properties, including a negative Poisson's ratio, negative thermal expansion, and holographic elasticity, and have many interesting applications in engineering. However, it is a grand…
Using Monte Carlo simulations, we investigate the self-assembly of model nanoparticles inside a matrix of model equilibrium polymers (or matrix of Wormlike micelles) as a function of the polymeric matrix density and the excluded volume…
While colloids are promising building blocks for the self-assembly of materials with novel microstructures, their numerous tunable parameters inhibit brute force searching for appropriate parameter combinations that yield self-assembly of a…
Fabrication of diamond structures by self-assembly is a fundamental challenge in making three-dimensional photonic crystals. We simulate a system of model hard particles with attractive patches and show that they can self-assemble into a…
Inertial effects should be considered for micro- and nano-swimmers moving in a low-density medium confined by irregular structures that create entropic barriers, where viscous effects are no longer paramount. Here, we present a separation…
We combine particle-based simulations, mean-field rate equations, and Wertheim's theory to study the dynamics of patchy particles in and out of equilibrium, at different temperatures and densities. We consider an initial random distribution…
The multiphase flow of droplets is widespread, both at the industrial and the microscale, for both biological and non-biological applications alike. But the ensemble interactions of such systems are inherently nonlinear and complex,…
Monodisperse spherical colloidal particles confined within emulsion droplets can crystallize into icosahedral clusters. Experimentally it was observed that a few large colloidal particles added as defects preferentially migrate to the…
Lipid membranes, the barrier defining living cells and many of their sub-compartments, bind to a wide variety of nano- and micro-meter sized objects. In the presence of strong adhesive forces, membranes can strongly deform and wrap the…
Under unitary evolution, a typical macroscopic quantum system is thought to develop wavefunction branches: a time-dependent decomposition into orthogonal components that (1) form a tree structure forward in time, (2) are approximate…