Related papers: Characterizing the Interplay between Polymer Solva…
We use a coarse grained solvent model to study the self assembly of two nano-scale hydrophobic particles in water. We show how solvent degrees of freedom are involved in the process. By using tools of transition path sampling, we elucidate…
Chemically-responsive polymers are macromolecules that respond to local variations of the chemical composition of the solution by changing their conformation, with notable examples including polyelectrolytes, proteins and DNA. The polymer…
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…
The aversion of hydrophobic solutes for water drives diverse interactions and assemblies across materials science, biology and beyond. % Here, we review the theoretical, computational and experimental developments which underpin a…
We investigate the kinetics of a polymer collapse due to the formation of irreversible crosslinks between its monomers. Using the contact probability $P(s)$ as a scale-dependent order parameter depending on the chemical distance $s$, our…
We study a single statistical amphiphilic copolymer chain AB in a selective solvent (e.g.water). Two situations are considered. In the annealed case, hydrophilic (A) and hydrophobic (B) monomers are at local chemical equilibrium and both…
Freezing of complex fluids is central to a wide range of natural and technological processes, where the interplay between heat transport, solute redistribution, and interfacial deformation gives rise to complex morphologies. Unlike simple…
Cononsolvency occurs when two miscible, competing good solvents for a polymer are mixed, resulting in a loss of solubility. In this study, we demonstrate through simulations, supported by theory, that cononsolvency can be driven solely by…
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…
Collapse of the polymer chain upon the sharp decrease of solvent quality is studied. During collapse, any pair of polymer units appearing in a sufficiently close vicinity in space has the possibility with a certain probability to form an…
We define a lattice model for the interaction of a polymer with water. We solve the model in a suitable approximation. In the case of a non-polar homopolymer, for reasonable values of the parameters, the polymer is found in a non-compact…
Motivated by single molecule experiments on biopolymers we explore equilibrium morphologies and force-extension behavior of copolymers with hydrophobic segments using Langevin dynamics simulations. We find that the interplay between…
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,…
Water near hydrophobic surfaces is like that at a liquid-vapor interface, where fluctuations in water density are substantially enhanced compared to that in bulk water. Here we use molecular simulations with specialized sampling techniques…
Recent theories predict that when a supercooled liquid approaches the glass transition, particle clusters with a special "amorphous order" nucleate within the liquid, which lead to static correlations dictating the dramatic slowdown of…
In this paper we review some recent results, obtained jointly with Stu Whittington, for a mathematical model describing a copolymer in an emulsion. The copolymer consists of hydrophobic and hydrophilic monomers, concatenated randomly with…
Molecular dynamic simulations were employed to study a water-like model confined between hydrophobic and hydrophilic plates. The phase behavior of this system is obtained for different distances between the plates and particle-plate…
The emergent fluctuating hydrodynamics of a viscoelastic fluid modeled by the multiparticle collision dynamics (MPC) approach is studied. The fluid is composed of flexible, Gaussian phantom polymers, which interact by local…
The mechanism of the collapse of the superhydrophobic state is elucidated for submerged nanoscale textures forming a three-dimensional interconnected vapor domain. This key issue for the design of nanotextures poses significant simulation…
Polymers adopt extended coil and compact globule states according to the balance between entropy and interaction energies. The transition of a polymer between an extended coil state and compact globule state can be induced by changing…