Related papers: Charge affinity and solvent effects in numerical s…
Soft pair potentials predict a reentrant liquid phase for high concentrations, a behavior not observed experimentally. Here, very soft microgels confined at an oil-water interface are used as a model system of particles interacting via a…
Electrolyte theories enable to describe the structural and dynamical properties of simple electrolytes in solution, such as sodium chloride in water. Using these theories for aqueous solutions of charged nanoparticles is a straightforward…
A self-consistent theory of bulk electrolytes incorporating electrostatic and hard-core interactions on an equal level is applied to the two-dimensional Coulomb liquid with finite ion size. The ionic pair distributions, the structure…
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…
Chain-like macromolecules (polymers) show characteristic adsorption properties due to their flexibility and internal degrees of freedom, when attracted to surfaces and interfaces. In this review we discuss concepts and features that are…
The associative interaction, such as hydrogen bonding, can bring about versatile functionalities to polymer systems, which has been investigated by tremendous researches, but the fundamental understanding on association process is still…
Stimuli-responsive lyogels are considered to be smart materials due to their capability of undergoing significant macroscopic changes in response to external triggers. Due to their versatile and unique properties, smart lyogels exhibit…
We use coarse-grained Monte Carlo simulations to study the elastic properties of charged membranes in solutions of monovalent and pentavalent counterions. The simulation results of the two cases reveal trends opposite to each other. The…
Microgels are soft colloidal particles constituted by cross-linked polymer networks with a high potential for applications. In particular, after adsorption at a fluid interface, interfacial tension provides two-dimensional (2D) confinement…
Microgels are elastic and deformable particles with a hybrid nature between that of polymers and colloids and unconventional behaviours with respect to hard colloids. We investigated the dynamics of a soft microgel made of interpenetrated…
Thin films made of deformable micro- and nano-units, such as biological membranes, polymer interfaces, and particle-laden liquid surfaces, exhibit a complex behavior during drying, with consequences for various applications like wound…
A heterogeneous and dilute suspension of catalytically active colloids is studied as a non-equilibrium analogue of ionic systems, which has the remarkable feature of action-reaction symmetry breaking. Symmetrically coated colloids are found…
Spatial interaction effects between charge carriers in ionic systems play a sizable role beyond a classical Maxwellian description. We develop a nonlocal, two-fluid, hydrodynamic theory of charges and study ionic plasmon effects, i. e.…
The combination of soft responsive particles, such as microgels, with nanoparticles (NPs) yields highly versatile complexes of great potential for applications, from ad-hoc plasmonic sensors to controlled protocols for loading and release.…
We analyze the isotropic compaction of assemblies composed of soft pentagons interacting through classical Coulomb friction via numerical simulations. The effect of the initial particle shape is discussed by comparing packings of pentagons…
Past experimental observations of gas-liquid and gas-crystal coexistence in low-salinity suspensions of highly charged colloids have suggested the existence of like charge attraction. Evidence for this phenomenon was also observed in…
The organization of water molecules and ions between charged mineral surfaces determines the stability of colloidal suspensions and the strength of phase-separated particulate gels. In this article we assemble a density functional that…
An analytical description of polymer melts and their mixtures as liquids of interacting soft colloidal particles is obtained from liquid-state theory. The derived center-of-mass pair correlation functions with no adjustable parameters…
Hypothesis: The peculiar swelling behaviour of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM)-based responsive microgels provides the possibility to tune both softness and volume fraction with temperature, making these systems of great interest for…
We develop a double mean-field theory for charged macrogels immersed in electrolyte solutions in the spirit of the cell model approach. We first demonstrate that the equilibrium sampling of a single explicit coarse-grained charged polymer…