Related papers: Confetti Ordering by Polymer Brushes
We present a study on connectivity percolation in suspensions of hard platelets by means of Monte Carlo simulation. We interpret our results using a contact-volume argument based on an effective single--particle cell model. It is commonly…
Bottle brushes are polymeric macromolecules made of a linear polymeric backbone grafted with side chains. The choice of the grafting density {\sigma}g, the length ns the grafted side chains and their chemical nature fully determines the…
Disorder enhances desired properties, as well as creating new avenues for synthesizing materials. For instance, hardness and yield stress are improved by solid-solution strengthening, a result of distortions and atomic size mismatches.…
Molecular Dynamics simulations of a coarse-grained bead-spring model of flexible macromolecules tethered with one end to the surface of a cylindrical pore are presented. Chain length $N$ and grafting density $\sigma$ are varied over a wide…
When a granular material composed of elongated grains is sheared in a split-bottom shear cell, a pressure difference develops within the material. This pressure difference depends on the interparticle friction ($\mu$), which affects shear…
Compression of an adsorbed polymer layer distorts its relaxed structure. Surface force measurements from different laboratories show that the return to this relaxed structure after the compression is released can be slowed to the scale of…
The rheology of molecular brushes remains challenging to control due to the multiple length scales and relaxation processes involved and the lack of direct observation of molecular conformation during flow. We use molecular dynamics…
We study the equilibrium configuration of a nematic liquid crystal bounded by a rough surface. The wrinkling of the surface induces a partial melting in the degree of orientation. This softened region penetrates the bulk up to a length…
Polymer brushes are increasingly used to tailor surface physicochemistry for various applications such as wetting, adhesion of biological objects, implantable devices, etc. We perform Dissipative Particle Dynamics simulations to study the…
We study the stress distribution in a polymer brush material over a range of graft densities using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and theory. Flexible polymer chains are treated as beads connected by nonlinear springs governed by a…
Motivated by recent observations of charge order in the pseudogap regime of hole-doped cuprates, we show that {\it crisscrossed} stripe order can be stabilized by coherent, momentum-dependent interlayer tunneling, which is known to be…
The behavior of cross-linking polymer solutions as they transition from liquid-like to solid-like material in flow determines success or failure in several applications. Dilute polymer solutions flow easily, while concentrated polymers or…
Aqueous suspensions of Laponite, a system composed of disk-like nanoparticles, are found to develop optical birefringence over several days, well after the suspensions solidified due to jamming. The optical anisotropy is particularly…
Powdered materials of sizes ranging from nanometers to microns are widely used in materials science and are carefully selected to enhance the performance of a matrix. Fillers have been used in order to improve, among the others, mechanical,…
Anisotropically wetting substrates enable useful control of droplet behavior across a range of applications. Usually, these involve chemically or physically patterning the substrate surface, or applying gradients in properties like…
From glycosylated cell surfaces to sterically stabilized liposomes, polymers attached to membranes attract biological and therapeutic interest. Can the scaling laws of polymer "brushes" describe the physical properties of these coats? We…
We use laboratory experiments to investigate the entrainment of ambient fluid into an axisymmetric turbulent plume that contains dense particles with a settling velocity that is considerably smaller than the plume velocity. We consider the…
Durotaxis motion is a spectacular phenomenon manifesting itself by the autonomous motion of a nano-object between parts of a substrate with different stiffness. This motion usually takes place along a stiffness gradient from softer to…
Metal electrodeposition in batteries is fundamentally unstable and affected by different instabilities depending on operating conditions and chemical composition. Particularly at high charging rates, a hydrodynamic instability called…
Entropic forces in colloidal suspensions and in polymer-colloid systems are of long-standing and continuing interest. Experiments show how entropic forces can be used to control the self-assembly of colloidal particles. Significant advances…