Related papers: Attractive and repulsive polymer-mediated forces b…
We consider various lattice models of polymers: lattice trees, lattice animals, and self-avoiding walks. The polymer interacts with a surface (hyperplane), receiving a unit energy reward for each site in the surface. There is an adsorption…
Single partially confined collapsed polymers are studied in two dimensions. They are described by self-avoiding random walks with nearest-neighbour attractions below the $\Theta$-point, on the surface of an infinitely long cylinder. For the…
We study the effective forces acting between colloidal particles trapped at a fluid interface which itself is exposed to a pressure field. To this end we apply what we call the ``force approach'', which relies solely on the condition of…
Amorphous media at finite temperatures, be them liquids, colloids or glasses, are made of interacting particles that move chaotically due to thermal energy, colliding and scattering continuously off each other. When the average…
We report Monte Carlo results for the fluid structure of a system of dimeric particles interacting via a core-softened potential. More specifically, dimers interact through a repulsive pair potential of inverse-power form, modified in such…
We present the exact solutions of various directed walk models of polymers confined to a slit and interacting with the walls of the slit via an attractive potential. We consider three geometric constraints on the ends of the polymer and…
We show the existence of a force induced triple point in an interacting polymer problem that allows two zero-force thermal phase transitions. The phase diagrams for three different models of mutually attracting but self avoiding polymers…
Inwardly curved polymer brushes are present in cylindrical and spherical micelles or in membranes tubes and vesicles decorated with anchored polymers, and influence their stability. We consider such polymer brushes in good solvent and show…
The subject of this work is the adsorption transition of a long flexible self-avoiding polymer chain onto a rigid thin rod. The rod is represented by a cylinder of radius R with a short-ranged attractive surface potential for the chain…
Hydrophobically modified polymers are good candidates for the stabilization of liquid interfaces thanks to the high anchoring energy of the hydrophobic parts. In this article we probe the interfacial anchoring of a series of home-made…
One of the most unique physical features of cell adhesion to external surfaces is the active generation of mechanical force at the cell-material interface. This includes pulling forces generated by contractile polymer bundles and networks,…
A directed polymer is considered on a flat substrate with randomly located parallel ridges. It prefers to lie inside wide regions between the ridges. When the transversel width $W=\exp(\lambda L^{1/3})$ is exponential in the longitudinal…
The properties of semiflexible polymers tethered by one end to an impenetrable wall and exposed to oscillatory shear flow are investigated by mesoscale simulations. A polymer, confined in two dimensions, is described by a linear bead-spring…
Aqueous suspensions of microspheres were infused around gels of varying composition. The solutes were excluded from zones on the order of 100 micrometers from the gel surface. We present evidence that this finding is not an artifact, and…
When a mixture is confined, one of the phases can condense out. This condensate, which is otherwise metastable in the bulk, is stabilized by the presence of surfaces. In a sphere-plane geometry, routinely used in atomic force microscope…
We investigate the folding and forced-unbinding transitions of adsorbed semiflexible polymer chains using theory and simulations. These processes describe biologically relevant phenomena that include adhesive interactions between proteins…
We study the dynamics of an ideal polymer chain in a crowded, viscoelastic medium and in the presence of active forces. The motion of the centre of mass and of individual monomers is calculated. On time scales that are comparable to the…
We construct a micromechanical version of an early model for topologically constrained polymers -- a 2D chain amongst point-like uncrossable obstacles -- which allows us to explicitly elucidate the role of topological forces beyond…
The interaction of polymers with turbulent shear flows is examined. We focus on the structure of the elastic stress tensor, which is proportional to the polymer conformation tensor. We examine this object in turbulent flows of increasing…
The dynamic impedance of a sphere oscillating in an elastic medium is considered. Oestreicher's formula for the impedance of a sphere bonded to the surrounding medium can be expressed simply in terms of three lumped impedances associated…