Related papers: Self-assembly in soft matter with multiple length …
The experimental actualisation of organoids modelling organs from brains to pancreases has revealed that much of the diverse morphologies of organs are emergent properties of simple intercellular "rules" and not the result of top-down…
From understanding the sand on the beach to the foam on your beer, soft sphere simulations have been crucial to the study of the amorphous world around us. However, many of the materials we interact with on a daily basis aren't comprised of…
Soft particles are known to overlap and form stable clusters that self-assemble into periodic crystalline phases with density-independent lattice constants. We use molecular dynamics simulations in two dimensions to demonstrate that,…
Self-assembly is traditionally described as the process through which an initially disordered system relaxes towards an equilibrium ordered phase only driven by local interactions between its building blocks. However, This definition is too…
We investigate the internal structure of a polymer during collapse from an expanded coil to a compact globule. Collapse is more probable in local regions of high curvature, so a smoothing of the fractal polymer structure occurs that…
We show that chiral symmetry can be broken spontaneously in one-component systems with isotropic interactions, i.e. many-particle systems having maximal a priori symmetry. This is achieved by designing isotropic potentials that lead to…
We consider a phase-separating mixture of active and passive fluids and explore morphological asymmetries of the emerging dominantly bicontinous dynamic emulsion. Two-dimensional numerical simulations reveal that the geometric and…
Polymer materials have the characteristic feature that they are multiscale systems by definition. Already the description of a single molecules involves a multitude of different scales, and cooperative processes in polymer assemblies are…
Colloidal molecules are designed to mimic their molecular analogues through their anisotropic shape and interactions. However, current experimental realizations are missing the structural flexibility present in real molecules thereby…
The self-assembly of particles into organized structures is a key feature of living organisms and a major engineering challenge. While it may proceed through the binding of perfectly matched, puzzle-pieces-like particles, many other…
We investigate the evolutionary dynamics of an idealised model for the robust self-assembly of two-dimensional structures called polyominoes. The model includes rules that encode interactions between sets of square tiles that drive the…
The surface curvature of membranes, interfaces, and substrates plays a crucial role in shaping the self-assembly of particles adsorbed on these surfaces. However, little is known about the interplay between particle anisotropy and surface…
Bacterial microcompartments are large, roughly icosahedral shells that assemble around enzymes and reactants involved in certain metabolic pathways in bacteria. Motivated by microcompartment assembly, we use coarse-grained computational and…
The biomolecules in and around a living cell -- proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, carbohydrates -- continuously sample myriad conformational states that are thermally accessible at physiological temperatures. Simultaneously, a given…
We explore the use of templated self-assembly to facilitate the formation of complex target structures made from patchy particles. First, we consider the templating of high-symmetry shell structures around a spherical core particle. We find…
Starting from a microscopic lattice model, we investigate clustering, micellization and micelle ordering in semi-dilute solutions of AB diblock copolymers in a selective solvent. To bridge the gap in length scales, from monomers to ordered…
Formation of highly ordered structures usually needs to overcome a high free-energy barrier that is greatly beyond the ability of thermodynamic fluctuation, such that the system would be easily trapped into a state with many defects and the…
A number of novel experimental and theoretical results have recently been obtained on active soft matter, demonstrating the various interesting universal and anomalous features of this kind of driven systems. Here we consider a fundamental…
One of the challenges of self-assembling finite-sized colloidal aggregates with a sought morphology is the necessity of precisely sorting the position of the colloids at the microscopic scale to avoid the formation of off-target structures.…
Soft matter systems are common in nature and make up nearly all the essential components necessary for life, from cells to the organelles within those cells. The ability of these soft materials to deform is crucial for the proper…