Related papers: Rapid Spontaneous Assembly of Single Component Lip…
Liquid shells, such as lipid vesicles and soap bubbles, are ubiquitous throughout biology, engineered matter, and everyday life. Their creation and disintegration are defined by a singularity that separates a topologically distinct extended…
Block copolymer self-assembly is a fundamental process in which incompatible blocks spontaneously form organized microstructures with broad practical applications. Classical understanding is that the domain spacing is limited by the contour…
We study a generic model of self-assembling chains which can branch and form networks with branching points (junctions) of arbitrary functionality. The physical realizations include physical gels, wormlike micells, dipolar fluids and…
Autonomous locomotion is a ubiquitous phenomenon in biology and in physics of active systems at microscopic scale. This includes prokaryotic, eukaryotic cells (crawling and swimming) and artificial swimmers. An outstanding feature is the…
Self-assembly is a process which is ubiquitous in natural, especially biological systems. It occurs when groups of relatively simple components spontaneously combine to form more complex structures. While such systems have inspired a large…
Extensive experimental studies have shown that numerous ordered phases can be formed via the self-assembly of T-shaped liquid crystalline molecules (TLCMs) composed of a rigid backbone, two flexible end chains and a flexible side chain.…
Piezo ion channels underlie many forms of mechanosensation in vertebrates, and have been found to bend the membrane into strongly curved dome shapes. We develop here a methodology describing the self-assembly of lipids and Piezo into…
The fabrication of versatile building blocks that are reliably self-assemble into desired ordered and disordered phases is amongst the hottest topics in contemporary material science. To this end, microscopic units of varying complexity,…
This paper describes a 2D particle system in which autopoietic vesicles that are able to grow, repair, and reproduce can emerge from an initial random distribution of individual components. The reproduction process also exhibits inheritance…
Macrocellular silicone polymers are obtained after solidification of the continuous phase of a PDMS (polydimethylsiloxane) emulsion, which contains PEG (polyethylene glycol) drops of sub-millimetric dimensions. Coalescence of the liquid…
Hierarchically structured natural materials possess functionalities unattainable to the same components organized or mixed in simpler ways. For instance, the bones and teeth of mammals are far stronger and more durable than the mineral…
In this work we studied polymerization-induced self-assembly by means of computer simulations. Using this model, phase diagrams of the micelle states were constructed depending on the polymer concentration and the asymmetry of the…
Inspired by recent experiments on the spatial organization of bacterial chromosomes, we consider a type of "bottle brush" polymer consisting of a flexible backbone chain, to which flexible side loops are connected. We show that such a model…
Using exhaustive Monte Carlo simulations we study the kinetics and mechanism of fibril formation using lattice models as a function of temperature and the number of chains. While these models are, at best, caricatures of peptides, we show…
The general Helfrich shape equation determined by minimizing the curvature free energy describes the equilibrium shapes of the axisymmetric lipid bilayer vesicles in different conditions. It is a non-linear differential equation with…
Controlling the topology of structures self-assembled from a set of heterogeneous building blocks is highly desirable for many applications, but is poorly understood theoretically. Here we show that the thermodynamic theory of self-assembly…
We report numerical investigations of a three-dimensional model of diffusive growth of fine particles, the internal structure of which corresponds to different crystal lattices. A growing cluster (particle) is immersed in, and exchanges…
Silicon self-assembly at step edges in the initial stage of homoepitaxial growth on a vicinal Si(111) surface is studied by scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). The resulting atomic structures change dramatically from a parallel array of…
Bridging the gap between atomistic detail and continuum mechanics is a central challenge in modeling biological membranes, particularly for mesoscopic phenomena spanning large length and time scales. In this work, we introduce a new,…
The simulated self-assembly of molecular building blocks into functional complexes is a key area of study in computational biology and materials science. Self-assembly simulations of proteins using physically-motivated potentials for…