Related papers: Interfacial Phenomena of Solvent-diluted Block Cop…
In these proceedings, we first summarize some general properties of phase transitions in the presence of quenched disorder, with emphasis on the following points: the need to distinguish typical and averaged correlations, the possible…
Theoretical aspects of polymers in mixed solvents are considered using the Edwards Hamiltonian formalism. Thermodynamic and structural properties are investigated and some predictions are made when the mixed solvent approaches criticality.…
The miscibility of polymer blends, a classical problem in polymer science, may be altered, if one or both of the component do not have chain ends. Based on the idea of {\it topological volume}, we propose a mean-field theory to clarify how…
Isoporous membranes made from diblock copolymers have numerous applications, including water treatment and protein separation, and are successfully produced at a laboratory scale under controlled conditions. However, achieving optimal…
Chemically driven fluids can demix to form condensed droplets that exhibit phase behaviors not observed at equilibrium. In particular, nonequilibrium interfacial properties can emerge when the chemical reactions are driven differentially…
We analyze the combined effect of the long range Coulomb (LRC) interaction and of surface energy on first order density-driven phase transitions in the presence of a compensating rigid background. We study mixed states formed by regions of…
Biomolecular condensates such as membraneless organelles, underpinned by liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS), are important for physiological function, with electrostatics -- among other interaction types -- being a prominent force in…
Colloid-polymer mixtures may undergo either fluid-fluid phase separation or gelation. This depends on the depth of the quench (polymer concentration) and polymer-colloid size ratio. We present a real-space study of dynamics in phase…
We present a generalized theory for studying static monomer density-density correlation function (structure factor) in concentrated solutions and melts of dipolar as well as ionic polymers. The theory captures effects of electrostatic…
In this paper we review some recent results, obtained jointly with Stu Whittington, for a mathematical model describing a copolymer in an emulsion. The copolymer consists of hydrophobic and hydrophilic monomers, concatenated randomly with…
Confined in two dimensional planes, polymer chains comprising dense monolayer solution are segregated from each other due to topological interaction. Although the segregation is inherent in two dimensions (2D), the solution may display…
We present a field-theoretic renormalization group analysis of a polymer chain immersed in a binary good solvent close to its critical demixing point. We first show that this problem can be mapped on a bicritical field theory, i.e. a…
Motivated by recent experiments, we consider theoretically the compression of droplets pinned at the bottom on a surface of finite area. We show that if the droplet is sufficiently compressed at the top by a surface, it will always develop…
We study the zero temperature phase diagram of an imbalanced bilayer of dipolar fermions. We consider perpendicularly aligned identical dipoles in two layers and investigate the effect of population imbalance on the ground state phase at…
Cononsolvency occurs when two miscible, competing good solvents for a polymer are mixed, resulting in a loss of solubility. In this study, we demonstrate through simulations, supported by theory, that cononsolvency can be driven solely by…
We consider stagnation point flow away from a wall for creeping flow of dilute polymer solutions. For a simplified flow geometry, we explicitly show that a narrow region of strong polymer extension (a birefringent strand) forms downstream…
Molecular dynamics simulations were performed for a polymer melt. In quiescent states, the inter-chain interaction energy supported by each particle takes relatively large values persistently for long times if the particle is close to an…
We consider star polymers, consisting of two different polymer species, in a solvent subject to quenched correlated structural obstacles. We assume that the disorder is correlated with a power-law decay of the pair correlation function…
We discuss the conditions under which the predicted (but not yet observed) zero-field interlayer excitonic condensation in double layer graphene has a critical temperature high enough to allow detection. Crucially, disorder arising from…
Spatial confinement of a near-critical medium changes its fluctuation spectrum and modifies the corresponding order parameter distribution. These effects result in effective, so-called critical Casimir forces (CCFs) acting on the confining…