Related papers: Hydrogel menisci: Shape, interaction, and instabil…
Particles added to a fluid interface can be used as a surface stabilizer in the food, oil and cosmetic industries. As an alternative to rigid particles, it is promising to consider highly deformable particles that can adapt their…
Soft particles can be better emulsifiers than hard particles because they stretch at fluid interfaces. This deformation can increase adsorption energies by orders of magnitude relative to rigid particles. The deformation of a particle at an…
Microgels are soft colloidal particles that, when dispersed in a solvent, swell and deswell in response to changes in environmental conditions, such as temperature, concentration, and $p$H. Using Monte Carlo simulation, we model bulk…
Soft particles display highly versatile properties with respect to hard colloids, even more so at fluid-fluid interfaces. In particular, microgels, consisting of a cross-linked polymer network, are able to deform and flatten upon adsorption…
The effects of particle roughness and short-ranged non-central forces on colloidal gels are studied using computer simulations in which particles experience a sinusoidal variation in energy as they rotate. The number of minima $n$ and…
Many biological, culinary, and engineering processes lead to the co-encapsulation of several soft particles within a liquid interface. In these situations the particles are bound together by the capillary forces that deform them and…
We study the interaction of small hydrophobic particles on the surface of an ultra-soft elastic gel, in which a small amount of elasticity of the medium balances the weights of the particles. The excess energy of the surface of the deformed…
We report, for the first time, some experimental observations regarding a new type of long range interaction between rigid particles that prevails when they are suspended in an soft elastic gel. A denser particle submerges itself to a…
The physical mechanism of elasticity of liquid surfaces coated with colloidal particles is proposed. It is suggested that particles are separated by water clearings and the capillary interaction between them is negligible. The case is…
The size and shape of a large variety of polymeric particles, including biological cells, star polymers, dendrimes, and microgels, depend on the applied stresses as the particles are extremely soft. In high-density suspensions these…
Soft particles such as microgels and core-shell particles can undergo significant and anisotropic deformations when adsorbed to a liquid interface. This, in turn, leads to a complex phase behavior upon compression. Here we develop a…
Modeling membrane interactions with arbitrarily shaped colloidal particles, such as environmental micro- and nanoplastics, at the cell scale remains particularly challenging, owing to the complexity of particle geometries and the need to…
Raindrops falling on window panes spread upon contact, whereas hail can cause dents or scratches on the same glass window upon contact. While the former phenomenon resembles classical wetting, the latter is dictated by contact and adhesion…
Within a model where micrometer-size soft colloidal particles are viewed as liquid drops, we theoretically study the contact interaction between them. We compute the exact deformation energy across a broad range of indentations and for…
A uniform solidification front undergoes non-trivial deformations when encountering an insoluble dispersed particle in a melt. For solid particles, the overall deformation characteristics are primarily dictated by heat transfer between the…
The contact of a hydrogel during the rotational shearing on glass surface in concentrated polymer solution was observed in situ. Dynamic contact patterns that rotate in-phase with the rotational shearing of the gel were observed for the…
The efficiency of soft particles to stabilize emulsions is examined by measuring their desorption free energy, i.e., the mechanical work required to detach the particle from a fluid interface. Here, we consider rubber-like elastic as well…
Particles bound to an interface interact because they deform its shape. The stresses that result are fully encoded in the geometry and described by a divergence-free surface stress tensor. This stress tensor can be used to express the force…
We discuss a class of models for particulate gels in which the particle contacts are described by an effective interaction combining a two-body attraction and a three-body angular repulsion. Using molecular dynamics, we show how varying the…
The transport of particles across lipid-bilayer membranes is important for biological cells to exchange information and material with their environment. Large particles often get wrapped by membranes, a process which has been intensively…