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Using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations we study the interactions between elongated colloidal particles (length to breath ratio > 1) in a nematic host. The simulation results are compared to the results of a Landau-de Gennes elastic free…
We introduce a coarse-grained description of the surface energy of a nematic liquid crystal. The thermal fluctuations of the nematic director close to the surface renormalize at macroscopic scales the bare surface potential in a…
Interfacial properties of colloid--polymer mixtures are examined within an effective one--component representation, where the polymer degrees of freedom are traced out, leaving a fluid of colloidal particles interacting via polymer--induced…
Ferronematic materials are colloidal suspensions of magnetic particles in liquid crystals. They are complex materials with potential applications in display technologies, sensors, microfluidics devices, etc. We consider a model for…
We consider a one-dimensional model allowing analytical derivation of the effective interactions between two charged colloids. We evaluate exactly the partition function for an electroneutral salt-free suspension with dielectric jumps at…
We consider a binary system of small and large spheres of finite size in a continuous medium interacting via a non-negative potential. We work in the canonical ensemble and compute upper and lower bound for the free energy at finite and…
We determine the structure of charge-stabilized colloidal suspensions at low ionic strength over an extended range of particle volume fractions using a combination of light and small angle neutron scattering experiments. The variation of…
We present a theory of effective electrostatic interactions in polydisperse suspensions of charged macroions, generalizing to mixtures a theory previously developed for monodisperse suspensions. Combining linear response theory with a…
Polymer microgels exhibit intriguing macroscopic flow properties arising from their unique microscopic structure. Microgel colloids usually comprise a crosslinked polymer network with a radially decaying density profile, resulting in a…
A polydisperse system contains particles with at least one attribute $\sigma$ (such as particle size in colloids or chain length in polymers) which takes values in a continuous range. It therefore has an infinite number of conserved…
We study the interactions between two negatively charged macroscopic surfaces confining positive counterions. A density-functional approach is introduced which, besides the usual mean-field interactions, takes into account the correlations…
We study equilibrium configurations for the Euler-Plateau energy with elastic modulus, which couples an energy functional of Euler-Plateau type with a total curvature term often present in models for the free energy of biomembranes. It is…
The dependencies of charged particle pseudorapidity density and transverse energy pseudorapidity density at midrapidity on the collision energy and on the number of nucleon participants, or centrality, measured in nucleus-nucleus collisions…
We study the effect of boundary rugosity in nematic liquid crystalline systems. We consider a highly general formulation of the problem, able to simultaneously deal with several liquid crystal theories. We use techniques of Gamma…
Charge-stabilized colloidal suspensions can be conveniently described by formally reducing the macroion-microion mixture to an equivalent one-component system of pseudo-particles. Within this scheme, the utility of a linear response…
We investigate excluded-volume effects in a bidisperse colloidal suspension near a flexible interface. Inspired by a recent experiment by Dinsmore et al. (Phys. Rev, Lett. 80, 409 (1998)), we study the adsorption of a mesoscopic bead on the…
We study the global influence of curvature on the free energy landscape of two-dimensional binary mixtures confined on closed surfaces. Starting from a generic effective free energy, constructed on the basis of symmetry considerations and…
We develop a free energy framework to describe the response of glasses to applied stress. Unlike crystals, for which the free energy increases quadratically with strain due to affine displacements, for glasses, the nonequilibrium free…
We present a technique for calculating free-energy profiles for the nucleation of multicomponent structures that contain as many species as building blocks. We find that a key factor is the topology of the graph describing the connectivity…
A general theory has been developed for a polydisperse semi-flexible multi-block copolymer melt. Using the Bawendi-Freed approach to model semi-flexible chains an expression for the Landau free energy is derived in the weak segregation…