Related papers: Property Decoupling across the Nucleus-Melt Interf…
Kinetic barriers cause polymers to crystallize incompletely, into nanoscale lamellae interleaved with amorphous regions. As a result, crystalline polymers are full of crystal-melt interfaces, which dominate their physical properties. The…
We demonstrate that nascent polymer crystals (i.e., nuclei) are anisotropic entities, with neither spherical nor cylindrical geometry, in contrast to previous assumptions. In fact, cylindrical, spherical, and other high symmetry geometries…
We propose a theoretical approach to quantitatively account for the role of entanglement in the nucleation of polymer melts, which is the unique feature of polymer differentiated from small molecules. By performing molecular dynamics…
The nucleation of a droplet of stable cylinder phase from a metastable lamellar phase is examined within the single-mode approximation to the Brazovskii model for diblock copolymer melts. By employing a variational ansatz for the droplet…
In this paper, we investigate a stochastic model describing the time evolution of a polymerization process. A polymer is a macro-molecule resulting from the aggregation of several elementary sub-units called monomers. Polymers can grow by…
Phase transformations ruled by non-simultaneous nucleation and growth do not lead to random distribution of nuclei. Since nucleation is only allowed in the untransformed portion of space, positions of nuclei are correlated. In this article…
A coarse-grained molecular dynamics model of linear polyethylene-like polymer chain system was built to investigate the responds of structure and mechanical properties during uniaxial deformation. The influence of chain length, temperature,…
We study structural properties of a ring polymeric melt confined in a film in comparison to a linear counterpart using molecular dynamics simulations. Local structure orderings of ring and linear polymers in the vicinity of the surface are…
The influence of the molecular structure of the nematic liquid crystal (NLC) on the photoalignment process at the NLC -- polymer interface has been investigated experimentally. NLCs having exclusively phenyl-, or cyclohexane rings in the…
Droplet coalescence is ubiquitous in nature and the same time key to various technologies, such as inkjet printing. Here, we report on the coalescence of polymer droplets with different chain lengths coalescing on substrates of different…
The peculiar linear temperature-dependent swelling of core-shell microgels has been conjectured to be linked to the core-shell architecture combining materials of different transition temperatures. Here the structure of pNIPMAM-core and…
Large scale molecular dynamics simulations are used to study the dispersion of nanoparticles (NPs) in a polymer film during solvent evaporation. As the solvent evaporates, a dense polymer-rich skin layer forms at the liquid/vapor interface,…
We investigate the asymptotic separation of the optical model potential for nucleon-nucleus scattering in momentum space, where the potential is split into a medium-independent term and another depending exclusively on the gradient of the…
When moist air meets a cold surface, it creates a breath figure characterized by numerous small droplets. The central question is how the vapor flux is distributed between the growth of previously condensed drops and the nucleation of new…
We show by means of continuum theory and simulations that geometric percolation in uniaxial nematics of hard slender particles is fundamentally different from that in isotropic dispersions. In the nematic, percolation depends only very…
Collapse of the polymer chain upon the sharp decrease of solvent quality is studied. During collapse, any pair of polymer units appearing in a sufficiently close vicinity in space has the possibility with a certain probability to form an…
While recent efforts have shown how local structure plays an essential role in the dynamic heterogeneity of homogeneous glass-forming materials, systems containing interfaces such as thin films or composite materials remain poorly…
Polymer-grafted nanoparticles (PGNPs) can provide property profiles than cannot be obtained individually by polymers or nanoparticles (NPs). Here, we have studied the mixing--demixing transition of symmetric copolymer melts of…
The phase-field-crystal model is used to access the structure and thermodynamics of interfaces between two coexisting liquid crystalline phases in two spatial dimensions. Depending on the model parameters there is a variety of possible…
Letting free polymers diffuse from solution into a crosslinked polymer gel is often a crucial processing step in the synthesis of multiphase polymer-based gels, e.g., core-shell microgels. Here we use coarse-grained molecular dynamics…