Related papers: Superselective adsorption of multivalent polymeric…
Limited-valency colloidal particles can self-assemble into polymeric structures analogous to molecules. While their structural equilibrium properties have attracted wide attention, insight into their dynamics has proven challenging. Here,…
When injected through a contraction, high molecular weight polymer solutions exhibit a sharp increase of apparent viscosity which originates from stretching polymer chains above a critical extension rate. This chain stretching can also…
Theoretical studies of self-assembly processes and condensed phases in colloidal systems are often based on effective inter-particle potentials. Here we show that developing an effective potential for particles interacting with a limited…
Thermoresponsive polymer architectures have become integral building blocks of 'smart' functional materials in modern applications. For a large range of developments, e.g., for drug delivery or nanocatalytic carrier systems, the selective…
Using Langevin dynamics simulations, we study a system of transversely propelling filament and passive Brownian particles. We consider a polymer whose monomers experience a constant propulsion force perpendicular to the local tangent in the…
Confinement is a versatile and well-established tool to study the properties of polymers either to understand biological processes or to develop new nano-biomaterials. We investigate the conformations of a semiflexible polymer ring in weak…
The adsorption of polymer and surfactant molecules onto colloidal particles or droplets in solution can be characterized non-destructively by scattering techniques. In a first part, the general framework of Dynamic Light Scattering, Small…
Random sequential adsorption of spheres on a wavy surface was studied. It was determined how surface structure influences random packing properties such as the packing fraction, the kinetics of packing growth, and the two-particle density…
A thin film at a liquid interface responds to uniaxial confinement by wrinkling and then by folding; its shape and energy have been computed exactly before self contact. Here, we address the mechanics of large folds, i.e. folds that absorb…
The bending rigidity $k_c$ of bilayer vesicles self-assembled from amphiphilic diblock copolymers has been measured using single and dual-micropipet techniques. These copolymers are nearly a factor of 5 greater in hydrophobic membrane…
The properties of semiflexible polymers tethered by one end to an impenetrable wall and exposed to oscillatory shear flow are investigated by mesoscale simulations. A polymer, confined in two dimensions, is described by a linear bead-spring…
Polymer brushes are attractive as surface coatings for a wide range of applications, from fundamental research to everyday life, and also play important roles in biological systems. How colloids (e.g., functional nanoparticles, proteins,…
We consider a biopolymer bundle consisting of filaments that are crosslinked together. The crosslinks are reversible: they can dynamically bind and unbind adjacent filament pairs as controlled by a binding enthalpy. The bundle is subjected…
Polymeric particles are strong candidates for designing artificial materials capable of emulating the complex twisting-based functionality observed in biological systems. In this letter, we provide the first detailed investigation of the…
A coarse-grained multi-blob description of polymer solutions is presented, based on soft, transferable effective interactions between bonded and non-bonded blobs. The number of blobs is chosen such that the blob density does not exceed…
Binding of particles through weak (non-covalent) interactions plays a central role in multiple modern disciplines, from Cooper pairing of electrons in superconductivity to formation of supramolecules in biochemistry. Optical solitons, which…
Soft, amorphous solids such as tissues, foams, and emulsions are composed of deformable particles. However, the effect of single-particle deformability on the collective behavior of soft solids is still poorly understood. We perform…
We demonstrate that two mechanisms used by biological ion channels to select particles by size are driven by entropy. With uncharged particles in an infinite cylinder, we show that a channel that attracts particles is small-particle…
We use numerical simulations to show how noninteracting hard particles binding to a deformable elastic shell may self-assemble into a variety of linear patterns. This is a result of the nontrivial elastic response to deformations of shells.…
Soft matters whose constituents are deformable are ubiquitous in nature especially in biological systems-including cells and their organelles-as well as in foams and emulsions. The capacity for deformation in these soft materials gives rise…