Related papers: Shape-free theory for the self-assembly kinetics i…
More than a century has passed since van't Hoff and Arrhenius formulated their celebrated rate theories, but there are still elusive aspects in the temperature-dependent phase transition kinetics of molecular systems. Here I present a…
Self-assembly is a ubiquitous process in synthetic and biological systems, broadly defined as the spontaneous organization of multiple subunits (e.g. macromolecules, particles) into ordered multi-unit structures. The vast majority of…
Structure-forming systems are ubiquitous in nature, ranging from atoms building molecules to self-assembly of colloidal amphibolic particles. The understanding of the underlying thermodynamics of such systems remains an important problem.…
Many remarkably robust, rapid and spontaneous self-assembly phenomena in nature can be modeled geometrically starting from a collection of rigid bunches of spheres. This paper highlights the role of symmetry in sphere-based assembly…
A microscopic theory is presented for identifying shape-phase structures and transitions in interacting fermion systems. The method provides a microscopic description for collective shape-phases, and reveals detailed dependence of such…
Self-assembly is a fundamental concept in biology and of significant interest to nanotechnology. Significant progress has been made in characterizing and controlling the properties of the resulting structures, both experimentally and…
Amphiphilic molecules spontaneously form self-assembled structures of various shapes depending on their molecular structures, the temperature, and other physical conditions. The functionalities of these structures are dictated by their…
A common approach to study nucleation rates is the estimation of free-energy barriers. This usually requires knowledge about the shape of the forming droplet, a task that becomes notoriously difficult in macromolecular setups starting with…
We study the self-assembly behaviour of patchy particles with `protein-like' interactions that can be considered as a minimal model for the assembly of viral capsids and other shell-like protein complexes. We thoroughly explore the…
Aggregation transitions in disordered mesoscopic systems play an important role in several areas of knowledge, from materials science to biology. The lack of a thermodynamic limit in systems that are intrinsically finite makes the…
Self-assembly is the autonomous organization of components into patterns or structures: an essential ingredient of biology and a desired route to complex organization. At equilibrium, the structure is encoded through specific interactions,…
A binary mixture of particles interacting with spherically-symmetric potentials leading to microsegregation is studied by theory and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. We consider spherical particles with equal diameters and volume…
Many structural properties of conventional passive materials are known to arise from the symmetries of their microscopic constituents. By contrast, it is largely unclear how the interplay between cell shape and self-propulsion controls the…
A new theoretical approach is described for the inverse self-assembly problem, i.e., the reconstruction of the interparticle interaction from a given structure. This theory is based on the variational principle for the functional that is…
Self-assembly is the mechanism that controls the formation of well defined structures from disordered pre-existing parts. Despite the importance of self-assembly as a manufacturing method and the increasingly large number of experimental…
Motivated by recent experimental findings in chemical synthesis of colloidal particles, we draw an analogy between self-assembly processes occurring in biological systems (e.g. protein folding) and a new exciting possibility in the field of…
Although pathway-specific kinetic theories are fundamentally important to describe and under- stand reversible polymerisation kinetics, they come in principle at a cost of having a large number of system-specific parameters. Here, we…
Extensive experimental studies have shown that numerous ordered phases can be formed via the self-assembly of T-shaped liquid crystalline molecules (TLCMs) composed of a rigid backbone, two flexible end chains and a flexible side chain.…
A series of simulations aimed at elucidating the self-assembly dynamics of spherical virus capsids is described. This little-understood phenomenon is a fascinating example of the complex processes that occur in the simplest of organisms.…
The self-consistent rate theory for surface growth in the submonolayer regime is generalized from mono- to multi-component systems, which are formed by codeposition of different types of atoms or molecules. As a new feature, the theory…