Related papers: Structuring polymer gels via catalytic reactions
We study the phase behavior of single homopolymers in a simple hydrophobic/hydrophilic off-lattice model with sequence independent local interactions. The specific heat is, not unexpectedly, found to exhibit a pronounced peak well below the…
We consider a theoretical model for a binary mixture of colloidal particles and spherical emulsion droplets. The hard sphere colloids interact via additional short-ranged attraction and long-ranged repulsion. The droplet-colloid interaction…
Cytoskeletal gels are prototyped to reproduce the mechanical contraction of the cytoskeleton in-vitro. They are composed of a polymer network (backbone), swollen by the presence of a liquid solvent, and active molecules (molecular motors,…
Self-propelled colloidal particles exhibit rich non-equilibrium phenomena and have promising applications in fields such as drug delivery and self-assembled active materials. Previous experimental and theoretical studies have shown that…
Generic interactions e.g. the Coulomb or other long ranged radially symmetric repulsive interactions between monomers of bead-spring model of a semi-flexible polymer induce instabilities in a initially straight polymer chain to form long…
An innovative method is proposed to generate configurations of coarse grained models for polymer melts. This method, largely inspired by chemical ``radical polymerization'', is divided in three stages: (i) nucleation of radicals (reacting…
Polymer behavior in mixed solvents often exhibits intriguing phenomena, such as cosolvency, where a polymer that collapses in two individually poor solvents becomes soluble in their mixture. In this study, we employ a combination of…
A spontaneous buckling transition in thin layers of monodomain nematic liquid crystalline gel was observed by polarized light microscopy. The coupling between the orientational ordering of liquid crystalline solvent and the translational…
The simplest prescription for building a patterned structure from its constituents is to add particles, one at a time, to an appropriate template. However, self-organizing molecular and colloidal systems in nature can evolve in much more…
Colloids that interact via a short-range attraction serve as the primary building blocks for a broad range of self-assembled materials. However, one of the well-known drawbacks to this strategy is that these building blocks rapidly and…
An important goal of self-assembly is to achieve a preprogrammed structure with high fidelity. Here, we control the valence of DNA-functionalized emulsions to make linear and branched model polymers, or `colloidomers'. The distribution of…
In this paper we extend the Gaussian self-consistent method to permit study of the equilibrium and kinetics of conformational transitions for heteropolymers with any given primary sequence. The kinetic equations earlier derived by us are…
An extensive study of single block copolymer knots containing two kinds of monomers $A$ and $B$ is presented. The knots are in a solution and their monomers are subjected to short range interactions that can be attractive or repulsive. In…
A common approach to study nucleation rates is the estimation of free-energy barriers. This usually requires knowledge about the shape of the forming droplet, a task that becomes notoriously difficult in macromolecular setups starting with…
Polyelectrolyte gels are a very attractive class of actuation materials with remarkable electronic and mechanical properties with a great similarity to biological contractile tissues. They consist of a polymer network with ionizable groups…
We investigate the phase behaviour of random copolymers melts via large scale Monte Carlo simulations. We observe macrophase separation into A and B--rich phases as predicted by mean field theory only for systems with a very large…
We have performed parallel tempering Monte Carlo simulations using a simple continuum heteropolymer model for proteins. All ten heteropolymer sequences which we have studied have shown first-order transitions at low temperature to ordered…
We present a thermal activated solvent bonding technique for the formation of embedded microstrucutres in polymer. It is based on the temperature dependent solubility of polymer in a liquid that is not a solvent at room temperature. With…
We investigate the internal structure of a polymer during collapse from an expanded coil to a compact globule. Collapse is more probable in local regions of high curvature, so a smoothing of the fractal polymer structure occurs that…
We consider a system of clusters made of elementary building blocks, monomers, and evolving via collisions between diffusing monomers and immobile composite clusters. In our model, the cluster-monomer collision can lead to the attachment of…