Related papers: Characterizing the Interplay between Polymer Solva…
Hydrophobic interactions provide driving forces for protein folding, membrane formation, and oil-water separation. Motivated by information theory, the poorly understood nonpolar solute interactions in water are investigated. A simple…
The coil-globule transition of hetero-polymer chains is studied here. By means of extensive Molecular Dynamics simulations, we show that the transition is directly linked to the complexity of the chain, which depends on the number of…
The rapid collapse of a polymer, due to external forces or changes in solvent, yields a long-lived `crumpled globule.' The conjectured fractal structure shaped by hierarchical collapse dynamics has proved difficult to establish, even with…
We examine nonequilibrium features of collapse behavior in model polymers with competing crystallization and glass transitions using extensive molecular dynamics simulations. By comparing to "colloidal" systems with no covalent bonds but…
We perform numerical simulations of an active fully flexible self-avoiding polymer as a function of the quality of the embedding solvent described in terms of an effective monomer-monomer interaction. Specifically, by extracting the Flory…
We have used neutron scattering to investigate the influence of concentration on the conformation of a star polymer. By varying the contrast between the solvent and isotopically labeled stars, we obtain the distributions of polymer and…
We report molecular dynamics simulations of a hydrophobic polymer-chain in aqueous solution between $260 {K}$ and $420 {K}$ at pressures of $1 {bar}$, $3000 {bar}$, and $4500 {bar}$. The simulations reveal a hydrophobically collapsed state…
Phase transitions in polar binary mixtures can be drastically altered even by a small amount of salt. This is because the preferential solvation strongly depends on the ambient composition. Together with a summary of our research in this…
Heat management in devices is a key to their efficiency and longevity. Here, thermal switches (TS) are of great importance because of their ability to transition between different thermal conductivity $\kappa$ states. While traditional TS…
Water and water-mediated interactions determine thermodynamic and kinetics of protein folding, protein aggregation and self-assembly in confined spaces. To obtain insights into the role of water in the context of folding problems, we…
The effective elasticity of highly charged stiff polyelectrolytes is studied in the presence of counterions, with and without added salt. The rigid polymer conformations may become unstable due to an effective attraction induced by…
Homopolymer chain with beads forming pairwise reversible bonds is a well-known model in polymer physics. We studied kinetics of homopolymer chain collapse, which was induced by pairwise reversible bonds formation. We compared kinetic…
A polymer chain tethered to a surface may be compact or extended, adsorbed or desorbed, depending on interactions with the surface and the surrounding solvent. This leads to a rich phase diagram with a variety of transitions. To investigate…
We study a single self avoiding hydrophilic hydrophobic polymer chain, through Monte Carlo lattice simulations. The affinity of monomer $i$ for water is characterized by a (scalar) charge $\lambda_{i}$, and the monomer-water interaction is…
The influence of poor solvent quality on fluid demixing of a model mixture of colloids and nonadsorbing polymers is investigated using density functional theory. The colloidal particles are modelled as hard spheres and the polymer coils as…
While the $\Theta$-collapse of single long polymers in bad solvents is usually a continuous (tri-critical) phase transition, there are exceptions where it is preempted by a discontinuous crystallization (liquid $\leftrightarrow$ solid)…
Dimerization and subsequent aggregation of polymers and biopolymers often occur under nonequilibrium conditions. When the initial state of the polymer is not collapsed or the final folded native state, the dynamics of dimerization can…
The most accepted origin for the water anomalous behavior is the phase transition between two liquids (LLPT) in the supercooled regime connected to the glassy first order phase transition at lower temperatures. Two length scales potentials…
Molecular dynamics simulations are used to investigate the conformations of a single polymer chain, represented by the Kremer-Grest bead-spring model, in a solution with a Lennard-Jones liquid as the solvent when the interaction strength…
Spherical confinement can act either stabilizing or destabilizing on the collapsed state of a semi-flexible polymer. General free-energy arguments suggest that the order of the unconstrained collapse transition is the distinguishing factor:…