Related papers: Gelation impairs small molecule migration in polym…
Polymer thin films doped with azobenzene molecules do have the ability to organize themselves in spontaneous surface relief gratings (SRG) under irradiation with a single polarized beam. To shed some light in this still unexplained…
Thermoreversible sol-gel transitions in solutions of rod-like associating polymers are analyzed by computer simulations and by mean field models. The sol-gel transition is determined by the divergence of the cluster weight average. The…
A cold electron beam propagating through a background plasma is subject to filamentation process due to theWeibel instability. If the initial beam radius is large compared with the electron skin depth and the beam density is much smaller…
The Kremer-Grest (KG) polymer model is a standard model for studying generic polymer properties in Molecular Dynamics simulations. It owes its popularity to its simplicity and computational efficiency, rather than its ability to represent…
A directed polymer is considered on a flat substrate with randomly located parallel ridges. It prefers to lie inside wide regions between the ridges. When the transversel width $W=\exp(\lambda L^{1/3})$ is exponential in the longitudinal…
We develop a new quantitative molecular theory of liquid-phase dipolar polymer gels. We model monomer units of the polymer network as a couple of charged sites separated by a fluctuating distance. For the first time, within the random phase…
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,…
We present molecular dynamics simulations on the slow dynamics of a mixture of big and small soft-spheres with a large size disparity. Dynamics are investigated in a broad range of temperature and mixture composition. As a consequence of…
We numerically study a simple model for thermo-reversible colloidal gelation in which particles can form reversible bonds with a predefined maximum number of neighbors. We focus on three and four maximally coordinated particles, since in…
We use large-scale molecular dynamics simulations of a simple glass-forming system to investigate how its liquid-gas phase separation kinetics depends on temperature. A shallow quench leads to a fully demixed liquid-gas system whereas a…
We investigate the structure and dynamics of a hard colloid-star polymer mixture in the range of its arrested phase separation, where an incipient demixing transition is interfering with a nearby vitrification line, focusing on the protein…
Polycrystalline materials can be viewed as composites of crystalline particles or grains separated from one another by thin amorphous grain boundary (GB) regions. While GB have been exhaustively investigated at low temperatures, where these…
Water/glycerol mixtures are common for experiments with biomacromolecules at cryogenic temperatures due to their vitrification properties. Above the glass transition temperature, they undergo liquid-liquid phase separation. Using the novel…
The cellular cytoplasm is organized into compartments. Phase separation is a simple manner to create membrane-less compartments in order to confine and localize particles like proteins. In many cases these particles are bound to fluctuating…
To model the dynamics of polymers formed through nucleation, elongated by polymerisation, shortened by depolymerisation and subject to aggregation reactions, we study a nonlinear integro-differential equation. Growth and shrinkage are…
We study at- and out-of-equilibrium dynamics of a single homopolymer chain at low temperature using molecular dynamics simulations. The main quantities of interest are the average root mean square displacement of the monomers below the…
Phase separation has recently emerged as an important organizational principle in the dense and heterogeneous environment within living cells. Here, we use a synthetic system to show that compressive stresses in a polymer network suppress…
Colloidal gels are elasto-plastic materials composed of an out-of-equilibrium, self-assembled network of micron-sized (solid) particles suspended in a fluid. Recent work has shown that far-field hydrodynamic interactions do not change gel…
We investigate the effect of fragmentation on the homogeneous free cooling of inelastic hard spheres, using Boltzmann kinetic theory and Direct Monte Carlo simulations. We analyze in detail a model where dissipative collisions may…
Glasses and gels are the two dynamically arrested, disordered states of matter. Despite their importance, their similarities and differences remain elusive, especially at high density. We identify dynamical and structural signatures which…