Related papers: Soft macromolecular confinement
The non-equilibrium structural and dynamical properties of flexible polymers confined in a square microchannel and exposed to a Poiseuille flow are investigated by mesoscale simulations. The chain length and the flow strength are…
Cutting-edge smart materials are transforming the domains of soft robotics, actuators, and sensors by harnessing diverse non-mechanical stimuli, such as electric and magnetic fields. Accurately modelling their physical behaviour…
Narrow membrane tubes are commonly pulled out from the surface of phospholipid vesicles using forces applied either through laser or magnetic tweezers or through the action of processive motor proteins. Recent examples have emerged where…
The deformation parameters beta and gamma together with the two-quasiparticle excitations are taken into account, for the first time, as coordinates within a symmetry conserving (angular momentum and particle number) generator coordinate…
Semiflexible polymers are ubiquitous in natural and artificial systems, where their intermediate rigidity gives rise to rich structural and dynamical behavior. Confinement plays a central role in these behaviors, as spatial restrictions can…
Ferrogels, i.e., hydrogels loaded with magnetic nanoparticles, have the ability to deform in external magnetic fields. The precise shape of deformation and the alignment of the gel in the field, however, depend on the interplay of several…
We study the conformational properties of complex polymer macromolecules, consisting in general of $n$ subsequently connected chains (blocks) of different lengths and distinct chemical structure. Depending on the solvent conditions, the…
The equilibrium state of a flexible fiber settling in a viscous fluid is examined using a combination of macroscopic experiments, numerical simulations and scaling arguments. We identify three regimes having different signatures on this…
Assemblies of purely repulsive and frictionless particles, such as emulsions or hard spheres, display very curious properties near their jamming transition, which occurs at the random close packing for mono-disperse spheres. Although such…
Polymer systems in slab geometries are studied on the basis of the recently presented Gaussian Ellipsoid Model [J. Chem. Phys. 114, 7655 (2001)].The potential of the confining walls has an exponential shape. For homogeneous systems in…
Molecular dynamics simulations of ultrathin water film confined between atomically flat rigid diamond plates are described. Films with thickness of one and two molecular diameters are concerned and TIP4P model is used for water molecules.…
The shape of a polymer plays an important role in determining its interactions with other molecules and with the environment, and is in turn affected by both of them. As a consequence, in the literature the shape properties of a chain in…
Confinement can have a dramatic effect on the behavior of all sorts of particulate systems and it therefore is an important phenomenon in many different areas of physics and technology. Here, we investigate the role played by the softness…
Designing smart devices with tunable shapes has important applications in industrial manufacture. In this paper, we investigate the nonlinear deformation and the morphological transitions between buckling, necking, and snap-through…
The ordering of rod-like particles in soft, deformable containers emerges from the interplay of anisotropic interactions, geometric confinement, and boundary compliance. This competition couples internal particle organization to container…
Numerical simulations of thin sheets undergoing large deformations are computationally challenging. Depending on the scenario, they may spontaneously buckle, wrinkle, fold, or crumple. Nature's thin tissues often experience significant…
We conducted molecular dynamics simulations to investigate chain conformations in adsorbed layers during polymer capillary imbibition. While the imbibition length adheres to the classical Lucas-Washburn equation, a notable deviation in…
The structure of flexible polymers endgrafted in cylindrical pores of diameter D is studied as a function of chain length N and grafting density \sigma, assuming good solvent conditions. A phenomenological scaling theory, describing the…
We develop a formalism to describe the equilibrium distributions for segments of confined branched networks consisting of stiff filaments. This is applicable to certain situations of cytoskeleton in cells, such as for example actin…
How do cells tune emergent properties at the scale of tissues? One class of such emergent behaviors are rigidity transitions, in which a tissue changes from a solid-like to a fluid-like state or vice versa. Here, we introduce a new way for…