Related papers: Soft lamellar solid foams from ice-templating of s…
Spatial confinement in nanoporous media affects the structure, thermodynamics and mobility of molecular soft matter often markedly. This article reviews thermodynamic equilibrium phenomena, such as physisorption, capillary condensation,…
The use of colloidal supported lipid bilayers (CSLBs) has recently been extended to create colloidal joints, that - in analogy to their macroscopic counterparts - can flexibly connect colloidal particles. These novel elements enable the…
A lattice model with soft repulsion followed by attraction is developed for a monolayer of hybrid core-shell particles self-assembling at an interface. The model is solved exactly in one dimension. One, two or three periodic structures and…
The ability to manipulate polar entities with multiple external fields opens exciting possibilities for emerging functionalities and novel applications in spin systems, photonics, metamaterials, and soft matter. Liquid crystals (LCs),…
A core-softened model of a glass forming fluid is numerically studied in the limit of very low temperatures. The model shows two qualitatively different behaviors depending on the strength of the attraction between particles. For no or low…
Hard-magnetic soft materials (HMSMs) are particulate composites that consist of a soft matrix embedded with particles of high remnant magnetic induction. Since the application of an external magnetic flux induces a body couple in HMSMs, the…
We use molecular dynamics simulations of a simple model to show that dispersions of slightly elongated colloidal particles with long-range dipolar interactions, like ferrofluids, can form a physical (reversible) gel at low volume fractions.…
The behavior of nuclear matter is studied at low densities and temperatures using classical molecular dynamics with three different sets of potentials with different compressibility. Nuclear matter is found to arrange in crystalline…
We study an elasticity model for compressed protein monolayers or particle rafts at a liquid interface. Based on the microscopic view of hard-core particles with soft shells, a bead-spring model is formulated and analyzed in terms of…
A variety of complex fluids consist in soft, round objects (foams, emulsions, assemblies of copolymer micelles or of multilamellar vesicles -- also known as onions). Their dense packing induces a slight deviation from their prefered…
Incorporating nanomaterials into hydrogels allows for the creation of versatile materials with properties that can be precisely tailored by manipulating their nanoscale structures, leading to a wide range of bulk properties. Investigating…
We describe a method to determine whether a material has isomorphs in its thermodynamic phase diagram. Isomorphs are state points for which various properties are invariant in reduced units. Such materials are commonly identified from…
A free-energy functional that contains both the symmetry conserved and symmetry broken parts of the direct pair correlation function has been used to investigate the freezing of a system of hard spheres into crystalline and amorphous…
Heterogeneous ice growth exhibits a maximum in freezing rate arising from the competition between kinetics and the thermodynamic driving force between the solid and liquid states. Here, we use molecular dynamics simulations to elucidate the…
We introduce and numerically study a model designed to mimic the bulk behavior of a system composed of single-stranded DNA dendrimers. Complementarity of the base sequences of different strands results in the formation of strong cooperative…
Dynamical heterogeneities in a colloidal fluid close to gelation are studied by means of computer simulations. A clear distinction between some fast particles and the rest, slow ones, is observed, yielding a picture of the gel composed by…
Ice growth from liquid phase has been extensively investigated in various conditions, especially for ice freely grown in undercooled water and aqueous solutions. Although unidirectional ice growth plays a significant role in sea ice and…
We present a new algorithm to design lightweight cellular materials with required properties in a multi-physics context. In particular, we focus on a thermo-mechanical setting, by promoting the design of unit cells characterized both by an…
Skyrmions are twirling magnetic textures whose non-trivial topology leads to particle-like properties promising for information technology applications. Perhaps the most important aspect of interacting particles is their ability to form…
Subjected to compressive stresses, soft polymers with stiffness gradients can display various buckling patterns. These compressive stresses can have different origins, like mechanical forces, temperature changes, or, for hydrogel materials,…