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A central question in high-energy nuclear phenomenology is how the geometry of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) formed in relativistic nuclear collisions is precisely shaped. In our understanding of such processes, two features are especially…
Neutron star crusts are studied using a classical molecular dynamics model developed for heavy ion reactions. After the model is shown to produce a plethora of the so-called "pasta" shapes, a series of techniques borrowed from nuclear…
Baryonic matter close to the saturation density is very likely to present complex inhomogeneous structures collectively known under the name of pasta phase. At finite temperature, the different geometric structures are expected to coexist,…
Recent numerical simulations of hard helical particle systems unveiled the existence of a novel chiral nematic phase, termed screw-like, characterised by the helical organization of the particle C$_2$ symmetry axes round the nematic…
As proteins typically have charges of around 10, they will interact strongly with charged surfaces. We calculate the electrostatic contribution to the interaction of crystals of protein with charged surfaces. The surfaces repel like-charged…
Eukaryotic DNA is packaged into chromatin: one-dimensional arrays of nucleosomes separated by stretches of linker DNA are folded into 30-nm chromatin fibers which in turn form higher-order structures. Each nucleosome, the fundamental unit…
Helical structures are ubiquitous in nature and engineering, ranging from DNA molecules to plant tendrils, from sea snail shells to nanoribbons. While the helical shapes in natural and engineered systems often exhibit nearly uniform radius…
Ferrogels, i.e., hydrogels loaded with magnetic nanoparticles, have the ability to deform in external magnetic fields. The precise shape of deformation and the alignment of the gel in the field, however, depend on the interplay of several…
The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) is a network of sheet-like and tubular structures that spans much of a cell and contains molecules undergoing diffusive searches for targets, such as unfolded proteins searching for chaperones and…
We report that protein confinement within nanoscopic vesicular compartments corresponds to a liquid-liquid phase transition with the protein/water within vesicle lumen interacting very differently than in bulk. We show this effect leads to…
In supernova cores and neutron star crusts, nuclei with exotic shapes such as rod-like and slab-like nuclei are expected to exist. These nuclei are collectively called nuclear "pasta". For the past decades, existence of the pasta phases in…
The nucleus of eukaryotic cells typically makes up around 30% of the cell volume and has significantly different mechanics, which can make it effectively up to ten times stiffer than the surrounding cytoplasm. Therefore it is an important…
The inherent structure landscape for a system of hard spheres confined to a hard cylindrical channel, such that spheres can only contact their first and second neighbours, is studied using an analytical model that extends previous results…
Two distinct routes lead to the creation of multi--scale equilibrium structures in dense degenerate plasmas, often met in astrophysical conditions. By analyzing an e-p-i plasma consisting of degenerate electrons and positrons with a small…
Interiors of neutron stars are ultra-dense and may contain a core of deconfined quark matter. Such a core connects to the outer layers smoothly or through a sharp microscopic interface or through an intermediate macroscopic layer of…
The configuration interaction approach to nuclear structure uses the effective Hamiltonian in a finite orbital space. The various parts of this Hamiltonian and their interplay are responsible for specific features of physics including the…
We coarse-grain a model of closely-packed ellipses that can vary their aspect ratio to derive continuum equations for materials comprising confluent deformable particles such as epithelial cell layers. We show that contractile nearest…
We investigate the thermodynamic, structural, and dynamic behavior of a three-dimensional coarse-grained ramp-shoulder fluid derived from effective interactions between polymer-grafted nanoparticles. The interaction combines a softened…
We explore the properties of nuclear pasta appearing in supernova matter, i.e., matter at finite temperature with a fixed proton fraction. The pasta phases with a series of geometric shapes are studied using the compressible liquid-drop…
Cellular uptake of nanoplastics is instrumental in their environmental accumulation and transfer to humans through the food chain. Despite extensive studies using spherical plastic nanoparticles, the influence of the morphological…