Related papers: Interfacial silica nanoparticles stabilize coconti…
We present single contact friction experiments between a glassy polymer and smooth silica substrates grafted with alkylsilane layers of different coverage densities and morphologies. This allows us to adjust the polymer/substrate…
Inhaled nanoparticles (< 100 nm) reaching the deep lung region first interact with the pulmonary surfactant, a thin lipid film lining the alveolar epithelium. To date, most biophysical studies have focused on particle induced modifications…
We propose a mean-field model to explore the equilibrium coupling between micelle aggregation and lattice choice in neutral copolymer and selective solvent mixtures. We find both thermotropic and lyotropic transitions from face-centered…
Cholesteric liquid crystals can exhibit spatial patterns in molecular alignment at interfaces that can be exploited for particle assembly. These patterns emerge from the competition between bulk and surface energies, tunable with the system…
Bimetallic nanoparticles (often known as nanoalloys) with core-shell arrangement are of special interest in several applications, such as in optics, catalysis, magnetism and biomedicine. Despite wide interest in applications, the physical…
Droplet coalescence is ubiquitous in nature and the same time key to various technologies, such as inkjet printing. Here, we report on the coalescence of polymer droplets with different chain lengths coalescing on substrates of different…
Silica-carbonate biomorphs are a class of emergent materials, i.e. composite microstructures made of nanometric carbonate crystallites surrounded by amorphous silica. They form via a co-precipitation process in an interplay between alkaline…
Field-theoretical method is efficient in predicting the assembling structures of polymeric systems. However, for the polymer/nanoparticle mixture, the continuous density description is not suitable to capture the realistic assembly of…
Cells offer numerous inspiring examples where proteins and membranes combine to form complex structures that are key to intracellular compartmentalization, cargo transport, and specialization of cell morphology. Despite this wealth of…
Experimental investigations of hydrophobic/water interfaces often return controversial results, possibly due to the unknown role of gas accumulation at the interfaces. Here, during advanced atomic force microscopy of the initial evolution…
The detailed nature of spatially heterogeneous dynamics of glycerol-silica nanocomposites is unraveled by combining dielectric spectroscopy with atomistic simulation and statistical mechanical theory. Analysis of the spatial mobility…
Letting free polymers diffuse from solution into a crosslinked polymer gel is often a crucial processing step in the synthesis of multiphase polymer-based gels, e.g., core-shell microgels. Here we use coarse-grained molecular dynamics…
We investigated the viscoelastic properties of colloid-polymer mixtures at intermediate colloid volume fraction and varying polymer concentrations, thereby tuning the attractive interactions. Within the examined range of polymer…
We demonstrate the engineering of a source of radiation from growing surface plasmons (charge density oscillations) in a composite nano-system. The considered hybrid nano-structure consists of a thick layer of a conducting substrate on…
Morphological transformations of amphiphilic AB diblock copolymers in mixtures of a common solvent (S1) and a selective solvent (S2) for the B block are studied using the simulated annealing method. We focus on the morphological…
We show quantitatively that tiny amounts of copolymer that decorate a oil/water interfaces can greatly enhance the stability of swollen surfactant hexagonal phases, comprising oil tubes regularly arranged in a water matrix. Such soft…
The dynamics of microphase separation and the orientation of lamellae in diblock copolymers is investigated in terms of a mean-field model. The formation of lamellar structures and their stable states are explored and it is shown that…
Controlling the assembly of polyelectrolytes and surfactant at liquid-liquid interfaces offers new ways to fabricate soft materials with specific physical properties. However, little is known of the relationships between the kinetics of…
We studied the morphology of linear particle deposits obtained by inkjet-printing of silica nanoparticle suspension in drying condition where contact line depinning occurs. We show that this evaporation mode can be obtained by adjusting the…
To prevent the flocculation and phase separation of nanoparticles in solution, nanoparticles are often functionalized with short chain surfactants. Here we present fully-atomistic molecular dynamics simulations which characterize how these…