Related papers: Single-file escape of colloidal particles from mic…
Microchannels are well-known in microfluidic applications for the control and separation of microdroplets and cells. Often the objects in the flow experience inertial effects, resulting in dynamics that is a departure from the underlying…
We reveal an unreported physical mechanism that enables the pre-concentration, sorting and characterization of charged polystyrene nanobeads and liposomes dispersed in a continuous flow within a straight micron-sized channel. Initially, a…
Self-propelled particles phase separate into coexisting dense and dilute regions above a critical density. The statistical nature of their stochastic motion lends itself to various theories that predict the onset of phase separation.…
The migration of active particles in slowly moving, crowded, and heterogeneous media is fundamental to various biological processes and technological applications, such as cargo transport. In this study, we numerically investigate the…
Many processes in chemistry, physics, and biology involve rare events in which the system escapes from a metastable state by surmounting an activation barrier. Examples range from chemical reactions, protein folding, and nucleation events…
Water nanoconfinement is known to occur inside material void spaces, such as 2D confinement between surfaces, 1D confinement inside nanotubes, and variable-dimension confinement inside nanoporous materials. In the present work we…
Using molecular dynamics simulations we study the slow dynamics of a hard sphere fluid confined in a disordered porous matrix. The presence of both discontinuous and continuous glass transitions as well as the complex interplay between…
Many natural and industrial systems involve particle-laden interfaces. Because interfacial particles prevent the coalescence and coarsening of drops, they hold promise for various applications requiring stable emulsions. Despite their…
The diffusive transport of biased Brownian particles in a two-dimensional symmetric channel is investigated numerically considering both the no-flow and the reflection boundary conditions at the channel boundaries. Here, the geometrical…
Combining experiments and theory, we address the dynamics of self-propelled particles in crowded environments. We first demonstrate that motile colloids cruising at constant speed through random lattices undergo a smooth transition from…
Binary encounters between spherical particles in shear flow are studied for a system bounded by a single planar wall or two parallel planar walls under creeping flow conditions. We show that wall proximity gives rise to a new class of…
Biological molecules, like all active matter, use free energy to generate force and motion which drive them out of thermal equilibrium, and undergo inherent dynamic interconversion between metastable free energy states separated by levels…
Dynamical density functional theory (DDFT) is a powerful variational framework to study the nonequilibrium properties of colloids by only considering a time-dependent one-body number density. Despite the large number of recent successes,…
Networks of channels conveying particles are often subject to blockages due to the limited carrying capacity of the individual channels. If the channels are coupled, blockage of one causes an increase in the flux entering the remaining open…
The study of first passage times for diffusing particles reaching target states is foundational in various practical applications, including diffusion-controlled reactions. In this work, we present a bi-scaling theory for the probability…
We investigate the outflux of ions through the channels in a cell membrane. The channels undergo an open/close cycle according to a periodic schedule. Our study is based both on theoretical considerations relying on homogenization theory,…
Recent numerical analyses to optimize the design of microfluidic devices for more effective entrapment or segregation of surrogate circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from healthy cells have been reported in the literature without concurrently…
Many physical processes depend on the time it takes a diffusing particle to find a target. Though this classical quantity is now well-understood in various scenarios, little is known if the diffusivity depends on the location of the…
We investigate single-particle diffusion in a two-state Langevin model where the friction coefficient randomly switches between low-friction (liquid-like) and high-friction (glassy-like) states. The dynamics are governed by the ratio…
Transport of colloid particles through narrow channels is ubiquitous in cell biology as well as becoming increasingly important for microfluidic applications or targeted drug delivery. Membrane channels in cells are useful models for…