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Using mesoscopic interfacial models and microscopic density functional theory we study fluid adsorption at a dry wall decorated with three completely wet stripes of width $L$ separated by distances $D_1$ and $D_2$. The stripes interact with…
Forming an interface between immiscible fluids incurs a free-energy cost that usually favors minimizing the interfacial area. An emulsion droplet of fixed volume therefore tends to form a sphere, and pairs of droplets tend to coalesce.…
Understanding the dynamics of drops on polymer-coated surfaces is crucial for optimizing applications such as self-cleaning materials or microfluidic devices. While the static and dynamic properties of deposited drops have been well…
Geometric frustration offers a pathway to soft matter self-assembly with controllable finite sizes. While the understanding of frustration in soft matter assembly derives almost exclusively from continuum elastic descriptions, a current…
Microfluidic channels are integral to biomedical technology and process engineering, offering versatility in handling fluids with complex properties, often a combination of viscous and elastic attributes. Despite significant advancements in…
We study ground states of a hybrid system consisting of a polymer and an attractive nanowire by means of computer simulations. Depending on structural and energetic properties of the substrate, we find different adsorbed polymer…
The mechanical properties of a disordered heterogeneous medium depend, in general, on a complex interplay between multiple length scales. Connecting local interactions to macroscopic observables, such as stiffness or fracture, is thus…
Understanding the complex self-assembly of biomacromolecules is a major outstanding question. Microtubules are one example of a biopolymer that possesses characteristics quite distinct from standard synthetic polymers that are derived from…
The mechanical, optical, and chemical properties of a wide variety of soft materials are enabled and constrained by their bulk structure. How this structure emerges at small system sizes during self-assembly has been the subject of decades…
Polymer blends consisting of two or more polymers are important for a wide variety of industries and processes, but, the precise mechanism of their thermomechanical behaviour is incompletely understood. In order to understand clearly, it is…
Metasurfaces play a key role in functionalizing light at the nanoscale. Existing dielectric metasurfaces, however, are often limited to geometric primitives and their usage in emergent hybrid metasurfaces is hampered as confinement of light…
Metasurfaces based on gap surface-plasmon resonators allow one to arbitrarily control the phase, amplitude and polarization of reflected light with high efficiency. However, the performance of densely-packed metasurfaces is reduced, often…
We show quantitatively that tiny amounts of copolymer that decorate a oil/water interfaces can greatly enhance the stability of swollen surfactant hexagonal phases, comprising oil tubes regularly arranged in a water matrix. Such soft…
The nonequilibrium dynamical behavior and structure formation of end-functionalized semiflexible polymer suspensions under flow are investigated by mesoscale hydrodynamic simulations. The hybrid simulation approach combines the…
Metamaterials benefit from unique architected patterns to achieve lightweight with exceptional mechanical properties inaccessible to conventional materials. Typical mechanical metamaterials are inspired by crystal-like lattice structures,…
Living and engineered systems rely on the stable coexistence of two interspersed liquid phases. Yet surface tension drives their complete separation. Here we show that stable droplets of uniform and tuneable size can be produced through…
Isoporous membranes made from diblock copolymers have numerous applications, including water treatment and protein separation, and are successfully produced at a laboratory scale under controlled conditions. However, achieving optimal…
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…
Controlling interfaces of phase separating fluid mixtures is key to creating diverse functional soft materials. Traditionally, this is accomplished with surface-modifying chemical agents. Using experiment and theory, we study how mechanical…
A coarse-grained multi-blob description of polymer solutions is presented, based on soft, transferable effective interactions between bonded and non-bonded blobs. The number of blobs is chosen such that the blob density does not exceed…