Related papers: Numerical modelling of non-ionic microgels: an ove…
Fundamental understanding of the effect of microscopic parameters on the dynamics of probe particles in different complex environments has wide implications. Examples include diffusion of proteins in the biological hydrogels, porous media,…
Colloidal gels constitute an important class of materials found in many contexts and with a wide range of applications. Yet as matter far from equilibrium, gels exhibit a variety of time-dependent behaviours, which can be perplexing, such…
Microscale hydrogels comprised of macromolecular networks have increasingly been used for applications involving cell encapsulation, tissue engineering and for the storage and release of active cargo molecules. However, the majority of such…
A low-temperature dynamical transition has been reported in several proteins. We provide the first observation of a `protein-like' dynamical transition in nonbiological aqueous environments. To this aim we exploit the popular colloidal…
We develop a model to describe the properties of random assemblies of polydisperse hard spheres. We show that the key features to describe the system are (i) the dependence between the free volume of a sphere and the various coordination…
Micropatterning techniques have become an important tool for the study of cell behavior in controlled microenvironments. As a consequence, several approaches for the creation of micropatterns have been developed in recent years. However,…
Responsive particles, such as biomacromolecules or hydrogels, display a broad and polymodal distribution of conformations and have thus the ability to change their properties (e.g, size, shape, charge density, etc.) substantially in…
Colloidal gels are formed through the aggregation of attractive particles, whose size ranges from 10~nm to a few micrometers, suspended in a liquid. Such gels are ubiquitous in everyday life applications, from food products to paints or…
We present the state-of-the-art theoretical modeling, molecular simulation, and coarse-graining strategies for the transport of gases and liquids in nanoporous materials (pore size 1-100 nm). Special emphasis is placed on the transport of…
The change of the structure of concentrated colloidal suspensions upon addition of non-adsorbing polymer is studied within a two-component, Ornstein-Zernicke based liquid state approach. The polymers' conformational degrees of freedom are…
We discuss the reliability of integral-equation methods based on several commonly used closure relations in determining the phase diagram of coarse-grained models of soft-matter systems characterized by mutually interacting soft and…
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…
The mechanical properties of a disordered heterogeneous medium depend, in general, on a complex interplay between multiple length scales. Connecting local interactions to macroscopic observables, such as stiffness or fracture, is thus…
Ferrogels consist of magnetic colloidal particles embedded in an elastic polymer matrix. As a consequence, their structural and rheological properties are governed by a competition between magnetic particle-particle interactions and…
Poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (pNIPAM) microgels are renowned for their thermoresponsive behavior, exhibiting a distinct volume phase transition (VPT) upon temperature changes. This study investigates the influence of microgel softness,…
We generalize the concept of charge regulation of ionic solutions, and apply it to complex fluids with mobile macro-ions having internal non-electrostatic degrees of freedom. The suggested framework provides a convenient tool for…
Ionic liquids are widely used as electrolytes in electrochemical devices. In this context, many experimental and theoretical approaches have been recently developed for characterizing their interface with electrodes. In this perspective…
Engineering simple, artificial models of living cells allows synthetic biologists to study cellular functions under well-controlled conditions. Reconstituting multicellular behaviors with synthetic cell-mimics is still a challenge because…
We have investigated a single charged microgel in aqueous solution with a combined simulational model and Poisson-Boltzmann theory. In the simulations we use a coarse-grained charged bead-spring model in a dielectric continuum, with…
Emergent phenomena share the fascinating property of not being obvious consequences of the design of the system in which they appear. This characteristic is no less relevant when attempting to simulate such phenomena, given that the outcome…