Related papers: Soft macromolecular confinement
Macroscopic elastic core-shell systems can be generated as toy models to be deformed and haptically studied by hand. On the mesoscale, colloidal core-shell particles and microgels are fabricated and investigated by different types of…
Microcapsules are a key class of microscale materials with applications in areas ranging from personal care to biomedicine, and with increasing potential to act as extracellular matrix (ECM) models of hollow organs or tissues. Such capsules…
Entangled networks of stiff biopolymers exhibit complex dynamic response, emerging from the topological constraints that neighboring filaments impose upon each other. We propose a class of reference models for entanglement dynamics of stiff…
Collective cell motions underlie structure formation during embryonic development. Tissues exhibit emergent multicellular characteristics such as jamming, rigidity transitions, and glassy dynamics, but there remain questions about how those…
The present work presents a density-functional microscopic model of soft biological tissue. The model was based on a prototype molecular structure from experimentally resolved collagen peptide residues and water clusters and has the…
Elastic capsules, prepared from droplets or bubbles attached to a capillary (as in a pendant drop tensiometer), can be deflated by suction through the capillary. We study this deflation and show that a combined analysis of the shape and…
We study theoretically the shapes of biological tubes affected by various pathologies. When epithelial cells grow at an uncontrolled rate, the negative tension produced by their division provokes a buckling instability. Several shapes are…
We investigate morphologies of semiflexible polymer rings, such as circular DNA, which are adsorbed onto topographically or chemically structured substrate surfaces. We classify all equilibrium morphologies for two striped surface…
Molecular Dynamics simulations of a coarse-grained bead-spring model of flexible macromolecules tethered with one end to the surface of a cylindrical pore are presented. Chain length $N$ and grafting density $\sigma$ are varied over a wide…
Thermoresponsive microgels are soft colloids that find widespread use as model systems for soft matter physics. Their complex internal architecture, made of a disordered and heterogeneous polymer network, has been so far a major challenge…
The paper presents a short overview of the theoretical, numerical and experimental works on the critical behavior of a dilute polymer solution of long-flexible polymer chains confined in semi-infinite space restricted by a surface or in a…
We investigate how thin structures change their shape in response to non-mechanical stimuli that can be interpreted as variations in the structure's natural curvature. Starting from the theory of non-Euclidean plates and shells, we derive…
As an example for the interplay of structure, dynamics, and phase behavior of macromolecular systems, this article focuses on the problem of bottle-brush polymers with either rigid or flexible backbones. On a polymer with chain length…
Shape transformations in driven and damped molecular chains are considered. Closed chains of weakly coupled molecular subunits under the action of spatially homogeneous time-periodic external field are studied. The coupling between the…
Soft membranes are commonly employed in shape-morphing applications, where the material is programmed to achieve a target shape upon activation by an external trigger, and as coating layers that alter the surface characteristics of bulk…
Soft-granular media, such as dense emulsions, foams or tissues, exhibit either fluid- or solid-like properties depending on the applied external stresses. Whereas bulk rheology of such materials has been thoroughly investigated, the…
We consider the lattice model for an ideal-linear polymer chain to mimic the conformations of the semi-flexible homo-polymer chain. The polymer chain is assumed to confine in the fairly small area, such that the flexible chain conformations…
We introduce a new measure of the structure of a liquid which is the softness of the mean-field potential developed by us earlier. We find that this softness is sensitive to small changes in the structure. We then study its correlation with…
Many biological, culinary, and engineering processes lead to the co-encapsulation of several soft particles within a liquid interface. In these situations the particles are bound together by the capillary forces that deform them and…
We propose the quantitative mean-field theory of mechanical unfolding of a globule formed by long flexible homopolymer chain collapsed in poor solvent and subjected to extensional deformation. We demonstrate that depending on the degree of…