Related papers: Shape variation of micelles in polymer thin films
Large skyrmion bubbles in confined geometries of various sizes and shapes are investigated, typically in the range of several micrometers. Two fundamentally different cases are studied to address the role of dipole-dipole interactions: (I)…
Thin films of binary mixtures that interact through isotropic forces and directionally specific "hydrogen bonding" are considered through Monte Carlo simulations. We show, in good agreement with experiment, that the single phase of these…
The formation of self assembled structures such as micelles has been intensively studied and is well understood. The ability of a solution of amphiphilic molecules to develop micelles is depending on the concentration and characterized by…
Biological systems exploit self-assembly to create complex structures whose arrangements are finely controlled from molecular to mesoscopic level. Herein we report an example of using fully synthetic systems that mimic two levels of…
A simple and predictive model is put forward explaining the experimentally observed substantial shift of the glass transition temperature, Tg, of sufficiently thin polymer films. It focuses on the limit of small molecular weight, where…
A single semiflexible polymer chain folds into a toroidal object under poor solvent conditions. In this study, we examined the morphological change in such a toroidal state as a function of the width and stiffness of the chain together with…
We have studied structure formation in a confined block copolymer melt by means of dynamic density functional theory (DDFT). The confinement is two-dimensional, and the confined geometry is that of a cylindrical nanopore. Although the…
Mean-field techniques provide a rather accurate description of single-chain conformations in spatially inhomogeneous polymer systems containing interfaces or surfaces. Intermolecular correlations, however, are not described by the…
We study the effect of the molecular architecture of amphiphilic star polymers on the shape of aggregates they form in water. Both solute and solvent are considered at a coarse-grained level by means of dissipative particle dynamics…
Starting from a microscopic lattice model, we investigate clustering, micellization and micelle ordering in semi-dilute solutions of AB diblock copolymers in a selective solvent. To bridge the gap in length scales, from monomers to ordered…
Periodic wrinkling of a rigid capping layer on a deformable substrate provides a useful method for templating surface topography for a variety of novel applications. Many experiments have studied wrinkle formation during the compression of…
Understanding the relationship between colloidal building block shape and self-assembled material structure is important for the development of novel materials by self-assembly. In this regard, colloidal superballs are unique building…
We consider a model of a thin film elastically attached to a rigid substrate. In the case in which the film expands relative to the substrate and assuming certain non-linear elastic behavior of the film, expansion ridges may appear, in…
The surface a thin-film is attached to and the surrounding monolayer causes geometrical confinement of a interrogated molecule; we look at the base case of a SC$_{18}H_{37}$ in a SC$_{18}H_{37}$ monolayer on Au[111]. Normal mode analysis…
We show through rigorous calculations that dielectric microspheres can be organized by an incident electromagnetic plane wave into stable cluster configurations, which we call photonic molecules. The long-range optical binding force arises…
We examine the symmetry-breaking effect of fixed constellations of particles on the surface-directed spinodal decomposition of binary blends in the presence of particles whose surfaces have a preferential affinity for one of the components.…
Spherical particles confined to a sphere surface cannot pack densely into a hexagonal lattice without defects. In this study, we use hard particle Monte Carlo simulations to determine the effects of continuously deformable shape anisotropy…
Amphiphilic polymers in aqueous solutions can self-assemble to form bilayer membranes, and their elastic properties can be captured by the well-known Helfrich model involving several elastic constants. In this paper, we employ the…
The presence of nanoparticles in a diblock copolymer leads to changes in the morphology and properties of the matrix and can produce highly organized hybrid materials. The resulting material properties depend not only on the polymer…
We demonstrate spontaneous wrinkling as a transient dynamical pattern in thin freely floating smectic liquid-crystalline films. The peculiarity of such films is that, while flowing liquid-like in the film plane, they cannot quickly expand…