Related papers: Under pressure: Hydrogel swelling in a granular me…
Confinement can significantly alter fluid properties, offering potential for specific technological applications. However, achieving precise control over the structural complexity of confined fluids and soft matter remains challenging, as…
Structuring wheat gluten proteins into gels with tunable mechanical properties would provide more versatility for the production of plant protein-rich food products. Gluten, a strongly elastic protein material insoluble in water, is hardly…
We have studied the molecular scale hydrophobicity of an apolar solute, argon, confined between hydrophobic planar surfaces with different confinement widths. Specifically, we find that the hydrophobicity exhibits a non-monotonic behavior…
We investigate the effect of interstitial liquid on the physical properties of granular media by measuring the angle of repose as a function of the liquid content. The resultant adhesive forces lead to three distinct regimes in the observed…
Molecular segregation in methanol-water mixtures is studied across a wide concentration range as a function of temperature and pressure. Cluster distributions obtained from both neutron diffraction and molecular dynamics simulations point…
When a soft hydrogel sphere is placed on a rigid hydrophilic substrate, it undergoes arrested spreading by forming an axisymmetric foot near the contact line, while conserving its global spherical shape. In contrast, liquid water (that…
Microgels are colloidal-scale particles individually made of crosslinked polymer networks that can swell and deswell in response to external stimuli, such as changes to temperature or pH. Despite a large amount of experimental activities on…
Naturally occurring protein fibers often undergo anisotropic swelling when hydrated. Within a tendon, a hydrated collagen fibril's radius expands by 40% but its length only increases by 5%. The same effect, with a similar relative…
Granular elasticity, an elasticity theory useful for calculating static stress distribution in granular media, is generalized to the dynamic case by including the plastic contribution of the strain. A complete hydrodynamic theory is derived…
Density-driven segregations, extensively studied in a simple rotating drum, are enriched with a wide range of underlying physics. Diverse symmetrical segregation patterns formed by mixing two types of dry mono-sized grains have been…
Molecular beam experiments that use low-temperature bolometers as (energy-) detectors are well suited to the study of physisorption and recombination of hydrogen on low-temperature surfaces. Experiments where this technique is combined with…
The physical mechanisms that bring about the propulsion of a rotating helix in a granular medium are considered. A propulsive motion along the axis of the rotating helix is induced by both symmetry breaking due to the helical shape, and the…
We consider the sedimentation of a colloidal gel under confinement in the direction of gravity. The confinement allows us to compare directly experiments and computer simulations, for the same system size in the vertical direction. The…
First shells of hydration and bulk solvent plays a crucial role in the folding of proteins. Here, the role of water in the dynamics of proteins has been investigated using a theoretical protein-solvent model and a statistical physics…
Flow in soft materials encompasses a wide range of viscous, plastic and elastic phenomena which provide challenges to modelling at the microscopic level. To create a controlled flow, we perform falling ball viscometry tests on packings of…
"Granular elasticity," useful for calculating static stress distributions in granular media, is generalized by including the effects of slowly moving, deformed grains. The result is a hydrodynamic theory for granular solids that agrees well…
Ionic microgel particles in a good solvent swell to an equilibrium size determined by a balance of electrostatic and elastic forces. When crowded, ionic microgels deswell owing to a redistribution of microions inside and outside the…
Liquid may give strong cohesion properties to a granular medium, and confer a solid-like behavior. We study the erosion of a fixed circular aggregate of wet granular matter subjected to a flow of dry grains inside a half-filled rotating…
Despite the spontaneity of some in vitro protein folding reactions, native folding in vivo often requires the participation of barrel-shaped multimeric complexes known as chaperonins. Although it has long been known that chaperonin…
The properties of liquid water are known to change drastically in confined geometries. A most interesting and intriguing phenomenon is that the diffusion of water is found to be strongly enhanced by the proximity of a hydrophobic confining…