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The structural dynamics of macromolecules is important for most microbiological processes, from protein folding to the origins of neurodegenerative disorders. Noninvasive measurements of these dynamics are highly challenging. Recently,…
The change in contact angles due to the injection of low salinity water or any other wettability altering agent in an oil-rich porous medium is modeled by a network model of disordered pores transporting two immiscible fluids. We introduce…
The duality between deformations of elastic bodies and non-inertial flows in viscous liquids has been a guiding principle in decades of research. However, this duality is broken when a spheroidal or other doubly-curved liquid film is…
Wettability is a pore-scale property that impacts the relative movement and distribution of fluids in a porous medium. There are reservoir fluids that provoke the surface within pores to undergo a wettability change. This wettability…
We consider the hydrodynamics of lipid bilayers containing transmembrane proteins of arbitrary shape. This biologically-motivated problem is relevant to the cell membrane, whose fluctuating dynamics play a key role in phenomena ranging from…
We present a model for pore stabilization in membranes without surface tension. Whereas an isolated pore is always unstable (since it either shrinks tending to re-seal or grows without bound til to membrane disintegration), it is shown that…
Membrane pores are implicated in several critical functions, including cell fusion and the transport of signaling molecules for intercellular communication. However, these structural features are often difficult to probe directly. Droplet…
The behavior of thin liquid films is known to be strongly affected by the presence of surfactants at the interfaces. The detailed mechanism by which the latter enhance film stability is still a matter of debate, in particular concerning the…
We present a new theoretical approach to the kinetics of micelle formation in surfactant solutions, in which the various stages of aggregation are treated as constrained paths on a single free-energy landscape. Three stages of…
Zhelev and Needham have recently created large, quasi-stable pores in artificial lipid bilayer vesicles [Biochim. Biophys. Acta 1147 (1993) 89]. Initially created by electroporation, the pores remain open for up to several seconds before…
In biological tissues, it is now well-understood that mechanical cues are a powerful mechanism for pattern regulation. While much work has focused on interactions between cells and external substrates, recent experiments suggest that cell…
Recent experiments by Kantsler et. al. (2007) have shown that the relaxational dynamics of a vesicle in external elongation flow is accompanied by the formation of wrinkles on a membrane. Motivated by these experiments we present a theory…
We study the deformation of a surfactant-covered droplet under shear flow using a phase-field model that explicitly accounts for both the surfactant concentration and its polarization, representing the average molecular orientation. We…
A number of recent experiments have showed that surfactants can modify the growth mode of an epitaxial film, suppressing islanding and promoting layer-by-layer growth. Here a set of coupled equations are introduced to describe the coupling…
We numerically investigate the hydrodynamics and membrane dynamics of multicomponent vesicles in two strongly confined geometries. This serves as a simplified model for red blood cells undergoing large deformations while traversing narrow…
Direct numerical simulations are used to elucidate the interplay of wettability and fluid viscosities on immiscible fluid displacements in a heterogeneous porous medium.We classify the flow regimes based using qualitative and quantitative…
Lipid bilayer membranes have a native (albeit small) permeability for water molecules. Under an external load, provided that the bilayer structure stays intact and does not suffer from poration or rupture, a lipid membrane deforms and its…
As a first step towards a microscopic understanding of the effective interaction between colloidal particles suspended in a solvent we study the wetting behavior of one-component fluids at spheres and fibers. We describe these phenomena…
We theoretically investigate the thermally-driven curvature and lipid density fluctuations of a quasi-spherical vesicle, accounting for the dissipation due to monolayer viscosity and intermonolayer friction. The theory predicts that…
We have constructed a model for the kinetics of rupture of membranes under tension, applying physical principles relevant to lipid bilayers held together by hydrophobic interactions. The membrane is characterized by the bulk compressibility…