Related papers: Bending stiff charged polymers: the electrostatic …
Interactions between charged colloidal particles are profoundly influenced by charge regulation and charge renormalization, rendering the effective potential highly sensitive to local particle density. In this work, we investigate how a…
Electrostatic forces between small groups of colloidal particles are measured using blinking optical tweezers. When the electrostatic screening length is significantly larger than the particle radius, forces are found to be non-pairwise…
Polymer stretching in random smooth flows is investigated within the framework of the FENE dumbbell model. The advecting flow is Gaussian and short-correlated in time. The stationary probability density function of polymer extension is…
We investigate the kinetics of a polymer collapse due to the formation of irreversible crosslinks between its monomers. Using the contact probability $P(s)$ as a scale-dependent order parameter depending on the chemical distance $s$, our…
Loop formation between monomers in the interior of semiflexible chains describes elementary events in biomolecular folding and DNA bending. We calculate analytically the interior distance distribution function for semiflexible chains using…
Starting from the reported experimental evidence that the residence time of contacts between the ends of biopolymers is length dependent, we investigate the kinetics of contact breaking in simple polymer models from a theoretical point of…
We present numerical studies of the transport dynamics of a charged soliton in conjugated polymers under the influence of an external time-dependent electric field. All relevant electron-phonon and electron-electron interactions are nearly…
In layered materials, a common mode of deformation involves buckling of the layers under tensile deformation in the direction perpendicular to the layers. The instability mechanism, which operates in elastic materials from geological to…
The folding transition of biopolymers from the coil to compact structures has attracted wide research interest in the past and is well studied in polymer physics. Recent seminal works on DNA in confined devices have shown that these long…
We analyse bead--spring polymers coupled to Navier--Stokes turbulence in ultra--dilute solutions at Weissenberg number \(Wi\approx 80\). The polymers do not alter the large-scale turbulent structure, but hydrodynamic interactions generate…
In this paper we present a computer simulation study of ionic conductivity in solid polymeric electrolytes. The multiphase nature of the material is taken into account. The polymer is represented by a regular lattice whose sites represent…
We describe the complex time-dependence of the build up of force exerted by a clamped photo-elastomer under illumination. Nonlinear (non-Beer) absorption leads to a bleaching wave of a significant cis isomer dye concentration deeply…
A statistical mechanical description of flexible and semi-flexible polymer chains in a poor solvent is developed in the constant force and constant distance ensembles. We predict the existence of many intermediate states at low temperatures…
Extreme deformations of the DNA double helix attracted a lot of attention during the past decades. Particularly, the determination of the persistence length of DNA with extreme local disruptions, or kinks, has become a crucial problem in…
Electrostatic and Casimir interactions limit the range of positional stability of electrostatically-actuated or capacitively-coupled mechanical devices. We investigate this range experimentally for a generic system consisting of a…
The electrostatic stability of electron-positron plasmas is investigated in the point-dipole and Z-pinch limits of dipole geometry. The kinetic dispersion relation for sub-bounce-frequency instabilities is derived and solved. For the…
We consider the electrostatic interaction between two rigid membranes, with different surface charge densities of opposite sign, across an aqueous solution without added salt. Exact solutions to the nonlinear Poisson-Boltzmann equation are…
The linear instability of a beam tensioned by its own weight is considered. It is shown that for long beams, in the sense of an adequate dimensionless parameter, the characteristics of the instability caused by a follower force do not…
We study the dynamics of a double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) segment, as a semiflexible polymer, in a shear flow, the strength of which is customarily expressed in terms of the dimensionless Weissenberg number Wi. Polymer chains in shear flows…
We consider the problem of sliding motion of a charge-density-wave subject to static disorder within an elastic medium model. Starting with a field-theoretical formulation, which allows exact disorder averaging, we propose a self-consistent…