Related papers: The Effect of Explicit Polar Species on Conformati…
Conformational properties of a single flexible polyelectrolyte chain in a poor solvent are studied using constant temperature molecular dynamics simulation. The effects of counterions are explicitly taken in to account. Structural…
The collapse of flexible polyelectrolytes in a solution of multivalent counterions is studied by means of a two state model. The states correspond to rod-like and spherically collapsed conformations respectively. We focus on the very dilute…
We develop a new quantitative molecular theory of liquid-phase dipolar polymer gels. We model monomer units of the polymer network as a couple of charged sites separated by a fluctuating distance. For the first time, within the random phase…
Polyelectrolytes such as single and double stranded DNA and many synthetic polymers undergo two structural transitions upon increasing the concentration of multivalent salt or molecules. First, the expanded-stretched chains in low…
Light scattering and viscometric measurements on weak polyelectrolytes show two important aspects of counterion condensation, namely, non-monotonic variation in the polyelectrolyte size with the increase in the electrostatic strength, and,…
Polyelectrolytes under confinement are crucial for energy storage and for understanding biomolecular functions. Using molecular dynamics simulations, we analyze a polyelectrolyte solution confined between two oppositely charged planar…
We present a set of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of strongly charged, flexible polyelectrolyte chains under poor solvent conditions in a salt free solution. Structural properties of the chains and of the solutions are reported. By…
Hypothesis. The dielectric constant of an electrolyte solution, which determines electrostatic interactions between colloids and interfaces, depends nonlinearly on the salinity and also on the type of salt. The linear decrement at dilute…
Polar activity is shown here to induce a progressive local deformation of linear polymer chains, making a clear distinction between head and tail, while the overall chain conformation gets more compact. This breakdown of self-similarity,…
We study conformational and electrophoretic properties of polyelectrolytes (PEs) in tetravalent salt solutions under the action of electric fields by means of molecular dynamics simulations. Chain conformations are found to have a sensitive…
We analyze solutions of strongly charged chains bridged by linkers such as multivalent ions. The gelation induced by the strong short range electrostatic attractions is dramatically suppressed by the long range electrostatic correlations…
Properties of polyelectrolytes in tetravalent salt solutions are intensively investigated by a coarse-grained model. The concentration of salt and the size of tetravalent counterions are found playing a decisive role on chain properties. If…
The experimentally observed swelling and collapse response of weakly charged polymers to the addition of specific salts displays quite convoluted behavior that is not easy to categorize. Here we use a minimalistic implicit solvent /…
We study the conformational behavior of polarizable polymer chain under an external homogeneous electric field within the Flory type self-consistent field theory. We consider the influence of electric field on the polymer coil as well as on…
We investigate the collapse kinetics of charged polymers (polyelectrolytes) induced by counterion condensation using coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations. Under good solvent conditions, polyelectrolytes above the critical charge…
Structure and dynamics of a polymer under confinement gets significantly altered due to the imposed geometric restrictions. Using molecular dynamics simulations, here, we explore the effect of cylindrical confinement on the kinetics of…
We theoretically study the polarizability and the interactions of neutral complexes consisting of a semi-flexible polyelectrolyte adsorbed onto an oppositely charged spherical colloid. In the systems we studied, the bending energy of the…
Studies of the thermodynamics of complex coacervation of pairs of symmetric, strongly ionizable, oppositely charged polyelectrolyte chains are abundant. To generalize such understanding to asymmetric chain lengths and variable ionizability…
We study theoretically using scaling arguments the behavior of polyelectrolyte gels in poor solvents. Following the classical picture of Katchalsky, our approach is based on single chain elasticity but it accounts for the recently proposed…
The solvent quality determines the collapsed or the expanded state of a polymer. For example, a polymer dissolved in a poor solvent collapses, whereas in a good solvent it opens up. While this standard understanding is generally valid,…