Related papers: First-Order "Hyper-selective" Binding Transition o…

Entropic forces in colloidal suspensions and in polymer-colloid systems are of long-standing and continuing interest. Experiments show how entropic forces can be used to control the self-assembly of colloidal particles. Significant advances…

Predicting the adsorption affinity of a small molecule to a target surface is of importance to a range of fields, from catalysis to drug delivery and human safety, but a complex task to perform computationally when taking into account the…

Nanoparticles with multiple ligands have been proposed for use in nanomedicine. The multiple targeting ligands on each nanoparticle can bind to several locations on a cell surface facilitating both drug targeting and uptake. Experiments…

We consider a biopolymer bundle consisting of filaments that are crosslinked together. The crosslinks are reversible: they can dynamically bind and unbind adjacent filament pairs as controlled by a binding enthalpy. The bundle is subjected…

The structure and interactions in electrolytes at high concentration have implications from energy storage to biomolecular interactions. However many experimental observations are yet to be explained in these mixtures, which are far beyond…

Frictional contacts lead to the formation of a surface layer called the third body, consisting of wear particles and structures resulting from their agglomerates. Its behavior and properties at the nanoscale control the macroscopic…

Cells and other soft particles are often forced to flow in confined geometries in both laboratory and natural environments, where the elastic deformation induces an additional drag and pressure drop across the particle. In contrast with…

Polymer brushes are attractive as surface coatings for a wide range of applications, from fundamental research to everyday life, and also play important roles in biological systems. How colloids (e.g., functional nanoparticles, proteins,…

Trapping macromolecules is impoartant for the study of their conformations, interactions, dynamics and kinetic processes. Here, we develop a variational approach which self-consistently introduces a mean force that controls 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…

Targeted drug delivery relies on two physical processes: the selective binding of a therapeutic particle to receptors on a specific cell membrane, followed by transport of the particle across the membrane. In this article, we address some…

The friction and adhesion between elastic bodies are strongly influenced by the roughness of the surfaces in contact. Here we develop a multiscale molecular dynamics approach to contact mechanics, which can be used also when the surfaces…

We analyze the isotropic compaction of mixtures composed of rigid and deformable incompressible particles by the non-smooth contact dynamics approach (NSCD). The deformable bodies are simulated using a hyper-elastic neo-Hookean constitutive…

Liquid electrolytes adsorbed at the surface of metallic electrodes display a multitude of structures that can largely differ from the parent bulk system, both in terms of composition and local organization. In particular, the existence of…

This paper considers the equilibrium positions of $n$ particles in one dimension. Two forces act on the particles; a nonlocal repulsive particle-interaction force and an external force which pushes them to an impenetrable barrier. While the…

Restricting the number of attractive physical "bonds" that can form between particles in a fluid suppresses the usual demixing phase transition to very low particle concentrations, allowing for the formation of open, percolated, and…

Utilizing colloidal probe, lateral force microscopy and simultaneous confocal microscopy, combined with finite element analysis, we investigate the mechanism of static friction for a microparticle on a soft, adhesive surface. We find that…

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…

We propose that several mechanisms contribute to friction in a polymer melt adsorbed at a structured surface. The first one is the well known disentanglement of bulk polymer chains from the surface layer. However, if the surface is ideal at…

We provide a statistical and correlational analysis of the spatial and energetic properties of equilibrium configurations of a few-body system of two to eight equally charged classical particles that are confined on a one-dimensional…