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Polymer chains decorated with a fraction of monomers capable of forming reversible bonds form transient polymer networks that are important in soft and biological systems. If chains are flexible and the attractive monomers are all of the…
Conjugated polymers are observed to aggregate in solution. To account for this observation we propose a inter-chain binding mechanism based on the intermolecular tunneling of the delocalized $\pi$-electrons occurring at points where the…
Dewetting of ultrathin (< 100 nm) polymer films, by heating above the glass transition, produces droplets of sizes of the order of microns and mean separations between droplets of the order of tens of microns. These relatively large length…
Viscosities and their temperature, T, and volume, V, dependences are reported for 7 molecular liquids and polymers. In combination with literature viscosity data for 5 other liquids, we show that the superpositioning of relaxation times for…
We perform molecular dynamics simulations under uniaxial tension to investigate the micromechanisms underlying strain hardening in glassy polymers. By decomposing the stress into virial components associated with pair, bond, and angle…
Semiflexible polymers are ubiquitous in natural and artificial systems, where their intermediate rigidity gives rise to rich structural and dynamical behavior. Confinement plays a central role in these behaviors, as spatial restrictions can…
Understanding how a flow turns into an amorphous solid is a fundamental challenge in statistical physics, during which no apparent structural ordering appears. In the athermal limit, the two states are connected by a well-defined jamming…
We report molecular dynamics simulation results on the equilibrium properties of polymer thin films adsorbed onto flat and curved substrates. We first systematically determine the contact angle of polymer droplets on flat substrates as a…
We tune the thermodynamics of hydrogen absorption in Mg by means of elastic clamping. The loading isotherms measured by hydrogenography show that Mg films covered with Mg-alloy-forming elements, such as Pd and Ni, have hydrogen plateau…
The deformation kinetics for glassy polymers confined in microscopic domain at very low temperature regime was investigated using a transition-rate-state dependent model considering the shear thinning behavior which means, once material…
The effect of ring stiffness and pressure on the glassy dynamics of a thermal assembly of two-dimensional ring polymers is investigated using extensive coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations. In all cases, dynamical slowing down is…
We consider a stiff polymer chain in poor solvent and apply a force at one end of the chain. We find that by varying the stiffness parameter, polymer undergoes a transition from the globule state to the folded like state. The conformation…
When a swollen, thermoresponsive polymer gel is heated in a solvent bath, it expels solvent and deswells. When this heating is slow, deswelling proceeds homogeneously, as observed in a toroid-shaped gel that changes volume whilst…
Mesoscopic structure of the periodically alternating layers of stretched homopolymer chains surrounded by perpendicularly oriented oligomeric tails is studied for the systems with both strong (ionic) and weak (hydrogen) interactions. We…
Applications of commodity polymers are often hindered by their low thermal conductivity. In these systems, going from the standard polymers dictated by weak van der Waals interactions to biocompatible hydrogen bonded smart polymers, the…
We study the effect of film density on the uniaxial compression of thin elastic films at a liquid--fluid interface. Using a combination of experiments and theory, we show that dense films first wrinkle and then fold as the compression is…
We study the onset of rigidity near the glass transition (GT) in a short-chain polymer melt modelled by a bead-spring model, where all beads interact with Lennard-Jones potentials. The properties of the system are examined above and below…
Tuning cell rearrangements is essential in collective cell movement that underlies cancer progression, wound repair, and embryonic development. A key question is how tissue material properties and morphology emerge from cellular factors…
Hydrodynamic slippage plays a crucial role in the flow dynamics of thin polymer films, as recently shown by the analysis of the profiles of liquid fronts. For long-chained polymer films it was reported that a deviation from a symmetric…
We report temperature-responsive soft composites of semiflexible biopolymer networks (fibrin) containing dispersed microgel colloidal particles of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (pNIPAM) that undergo a thermodynamically driven de-swelling…