Related papers: Lamellar Diblock Copolymers on Rough Substrates: S…
Particle shape plays an important role in the phase behavior of colloidal self-assembly. Recent progress in particle synthesis has made particles of polyhedral shapes and dimpled spherical shapes available. Here using computer simulations…
The nucleation of a lamellar phase from a supercooled homogeneous phase in a fluctuation driven first-order transition is studied, based on a phenomenological free energy due to Brazovskii. The absence of phase coexistence in the…
We study pore nucleation in a model membrane system, a freestanding polymer film. Nucleated pores smaller than a critical size close, while pores larger than the critical size grow. Holes of varying size were purposefully prepared in liquid…
Block copolymers often create droplets when placed on a substrate. Such nanostructured droplets can be arranged into regular microstructured arrays, thereby forming hierarchically organized materials that can be used in microelectronics,…
The realization of robust quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) phases at elevated temperatures remains a central challenge in condensed matter physics. While quadratic band crossing points (QBCP) provide a promising route towards QAH states,…
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.…
In a continuing effort to understand divergences which occur when quantum fields are confined by bounding surfaces, we investigate local energy densities (and the local energy-momentum tensor) in the vicinity of a wall. In this paper,…
The nucleation of a droplet of stable cylinder phase from a metastable lamellar phase is examined within the single-mode approximation to the Brazovskii model for diblock copolymer melts. By employing a variational ansatz for the droplet…
We study the surface shape of two-dimensional piles using experiments and a continuum theory for surface flows of granular materials (the BCRE equations). We first obtain an analytical solution to the BCRE equations with a simple…
The properties of polymer liquids on hard and soft substrates are investigated by molecular dynamics simulation of a coarse-grained bead-spring model and dynamic single-chain-in-mean-field (SCMF) simulations of a soft, coarse-grained…
Self-consistent field theory (SCFT) has proven to be a powerful tool for modeling equilibrium microstructures of soft materials, particularly for multiblock polymers. A very successful approach to numerically solving the SCFT set of…
We study the global influence of curvature on the free energy landscape of two-dimensional binary mixtures confined on closed surfaces. Starting from a generic effective free energy, constructed on the basis of symmetry considerations and…
We analyze the combined effect of the long range Coulomb (LRC) interaction and of surface energy on first order density-driven phase transitions in the presence of a compensating rigid background. We study mixed states formed by regions of…
We present a combined experimental and theoretical study on the role of copolymer architecture in the self-assembly of binary PEO-PCL mixtures in water-THF, and show that altering the chain geometry and composition of the copolymers can…
We extend the force-level ECNLE theory to treat the spatial gradients of the alpha relaxation time and glass transition temperature, and the corresponding film-averaged quantities, to the geometrically asymmetric case of finite thickness…
We have studied the transition in shape of two dimensional polyampholytes using Monte Carlo simulation. We observe that polymers with randomly charged monomers get into a globular shape at lower temperatures, provided that their total…
We compute phase diagrams for $A_nB_m$ starblock copolymers in the strong-segregation regime as a function of volume fraction $\phi$, including bicontinuous phases related to minimal surfaces (G, D, and P surfaces) as candidate structures.…
It has been revealed by mean-field theories and computer simulations that the nature of the collapse transition of a polymer is influenced by its bending stiffness $\epsilon_{\rm b}$. In two dimensions, a recent analytical work demonstrated…
The drag of massless fermions in graphene double-layer structures is investigated in a wide rage of temperatures and inter-layer separations. We show that the inhomogeneity of the dielectric background in such graphene structures for…
The influence of surface constraints on the self-assembly of liquid droplets is investigated. A semi-quantitative explanation for large scale pattern formation consisting of small scale closely arranged droplets inside the large scale…