Related papers: Soft macromolecular confinement
Conformations of a single-component bottle-brush polymer with a fully flexible backbone under poor solvent conditions are studied by molecular-dynamics simulations, using a coarse-grained bead-spring model with side chains of up to N=40…
With suitably designed Monte Carlo simulations we have investigated the properties of mobile, impenetrable, yet deformable particles that are immersed into a porous matrix, the latter one realized via a frozen configuration of spherical…
Chain molecules play important roles in industry and in living cells. Our focus here is on distinct ways of modeling the stiffness inherent in a chain molecule. We consider three types of stiffnesses -- one yielding an energy penalty for…
How the geometry of nano-sized confinement affects dynamics of biomaterials is interesting yet poorly understood. An elucidation of structural details upon nano-sized confinement may benefit manufacturing pharmaceuticals in biomaterial…
In this work we present the general phase behavior of short tubelike flexible polymers. The geometric thickness constraint is implemented through the concept of the global radius of curvature. We use sophisticated Monte Carlo sampling…
Interplay between structure and function in atomically thin crystalline nanoribbons is sensitive to their conformations yet the ability to prescribe them is a formidable challenge. Here, we report a novel paradigm for controlled nucleation…
We study elasticity-driven morphological transitions of soft spherical core shell structures in which the core can be treated as an isotropic elastic continuum and the surface or shell as a tensionless liquid layer, whose elastic response…
Biological cells can actively tune their intracellular architecture according to their overall shape. Here we explore the rheological implication of such coupling in a minimal model of a dense cellular material where each cell exerts an…
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…
We report detailed theoretical investigations of the micro-mechanics and bulk elastic properties of composites consisting of randomly distributed stiff fibers embedded in an elastic matrix in two and three dimensions. Recent experiments…
Quantum shape effect appears under the size-invariant shape transformations of strongly confined structures. Such a transformation distinctively influences the thermodynamic properties of confined particles. Due to their characteristic…
Flexible mechanical metamaterials possess repeating structural motifs that imbue them with novel, exciting properties including programmability, anomalous elastic moduli and nonlinear and robust response. We address such structures via…
Tubular crystals, two-dimensional lattices wrapped into cylindrical topologies, arise in many contexts, including botany and biofilaments, and in physical systems such as carbon nanotubes. The geometrical principles of botanical…
Entangled polymers are deformed by a strong shear flow. The shape of the polymer, called the form factor, is measured by small angle neutron scattering. However, the real-space molecular structure is not directly available from the…
Systems under external confinement and constraints often show interesting properties. In this thesis, we study some systems under external confinement. We begin by finding out the probability distribution of end-to-end separation of a Worm…
We present the results of analytic calculations and numerical simulations of the behaviour of a new class of chain molecules which we call thick polymers. The concept of the thickness of such a polymer, viewed as a tube, is encapsulated by…
The longitudinal response of single semiflexible polymers to sudden changes in externally applied forces is known to be controlled by the propagation and relaxation of backbone tension. Under many experimental circumstances, realized, e.g.,…
Polymer models describing the statistics of biomolecules under confinement have applications to a wide range of single molecule experimental techniques and give insight into biologically relevant processes {\em{in vivo}}. In this paper, we…
The properties of polymer liquids on hard and soft substrates are investigated by molecular dynamics simulation of a coarse-grained bead-spring model and dynamic single-chain-in-mean-field (SCMF) simulations of a soft, coarse-grained…
Although thin films are typically manufactured in planar sheets or rolls, they are often forced into three-dimensional shapes, producing a plethora of structures across multiple length-scales. Existing theoretical approaches have made…