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Microgels made of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) are the prototype of soft, thermoresponsive particles widely used to study fundamental problems in condensed matter physics. However, their internal structure is far from homogeneous, and…
Thermoresponsive microgels find widespread use as colloidal model systems, because their temperature-dependent size allows facile tuning of their volume fraction "in situ". However, an interaction potential unifying their behavior across…
Encapsulation of chemicals using polymer membranes enables to control their transport and delivery for applications such as agrochemistry or detergency. To rationalize the design of polymer capsules, it is necessary to understand how the…
An important open problem in materials science is whether a direct connection exists between single-particle elastic properties and the macroscopic bulk behavior. Here we address this question by focusing on the archetype of soft colloids:…
The combination of soft responsive particles, such as microgels, with nanoparticles (NPs) yields highly versatile complexes of great potential for applications, from ad-hoc plasmonic sensors to controlled protocols for loading and release.…
Microfluidic channels are integral to biomedical technology and process engineering, offering versatility in handling fluids with complex properties, often a combination of viscous and elastic attributes. Despite significant advancements in…
The adsorption behavior of ions at liquid-vapor interfaces exhibits several unexpected yet generic features. In particular, energy and entropy are both minimum when the solute resides near the surface, for a variety of ions in a range of…
Lipid membranes, the barrier defining living cells and many of their sub-compartments, bind to a wide variety of nano- and micro-meter sized objects. In the presence of strong adhesive forces, membranes can strongly deform and wrap the…
We explore the influence of particle softness and internal structure on both the bulk and interfacial rheological properties of colloidal suspensions. We probe bulk stresses by conventional rheology, by measuring the flow curves, shear…
Solid interfaces have intrinsic elasticity. However, in most experiments, this is obscured by bulk stresses. Through microscopic observations of the contact-line geometry of a partially wetting droplet on an anisotropically stretched…
The interface of a soft hydrogel is easily deformed when it is in contact with particles, droplets or cells. Here we compute the intricate shapes of hydrogel menisci due to the indentation of point particles. The analysis is based on a free…
Being able to precisely characterize the mechanical properties of soft microparticles is essential for numerous situations from the understanding of the flow of biological fluids to the development of soft micro-robots. Here we present a…
The interaction of flexible polymers with fluid flows leads to a number of intriguing phenomena observed in laboratory experiments, namely drag reduction, elastic turbulence and heat transport modification in natural convection, and is one…
Ionic microgel particles in a good solvent swell to an equilibrium size determined by a balance of electrostatic and elastic forces. When crowded, ionic microgels deswell owing to a redistribution of microions inside and outside the…
When a fluid flows past a solid surface, its macroscopic motion arises from a subtle interplay between microscopic hydrodynamic and thermodynamic effects at the fluid-solid interface. Classical hydrodynamic models often rely on an…
The properties of polymer liquids on hard and soft substrates are investigated by molecular dynamics simulation of a coarse-grained bead-spring model and dynamic single-chain-in-mean-field (SCMF) simulations of a soft, coarse-grained…
We study swelling and structural properties of ionic microgel suspensions within a comprehensive coarse-grained model that combines the polymeric and colloidal natures of microgels as permeable, compressible, charged spheres governed by…
We perform a study of the interfacial properties of a model suspension of hard sphere colloids with diameter $\sigma_c$ and non-adsorbing ideal polymer coils with diameter $\sigma_p$. For the mixture in contact with a planar hard wall, we…
A minimalist simulation model for lipid bilayers is presented. Each lipid is represented by a flexible chain of beads in implicit solvent. The hydrophobic effect is mimicked through an intermolecular pair potential localized at the…
In recent years, ionic microgels have garnered much attention due to their unique properties, especially their stimulus-sensitive swelling behavior. The tunable response of these soft, permeable, compressible, charged colloidal particles is…