Related papers: Designing active colloidal folders
Twisting sheets as a strategy to form functional yarns relies on millennia of human practice in making catguts and fabric wearables, but still lacks overarching principles to guide their intricate architectures. We show that twisted…
Understanding how to produce forces using biomolecular building blocks is essential for the development of adaptive synthetic cells and living materials. Here we ask whether a dynamic polymer system can generate deformation forces in soft…
We present Monte Carlo simulations of colloidal particles pulled into grafted polymer layers by external fields. The insertion free energy of a single colloid into the polymer layer is qualitatively different for surfaces with an ordered…
Limited-valency colloidal particles can self-assemble into polymeric structures analogous to molecules. While their structural equilibrium properties have attracted wide attention, insight into their dynamics has proven challenging. Here,…
Predicting the large-amplitude deformations of thin elastic sheets is difficult due to the complications of self-contact, geometric nonlinearities, and a multitude of low-lying energy states. We study a simple two-dimensional setting where…
Over the years, advances in experimental and computational methods have helped us to understand the role of thermodynamic, kinetic and active (chaperone-aided) effects in coordinating the folding steps required to achieving a knotted native…
We consider a stiff polymer chain in poor solvent and apply a force at one end of the chain. We find that by varying the stiffness parameter, polymer undergoes a transition from the globule state to the folded like state. The conformation…
Soft materials, such as colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions, and biological systems, are typically multicomponent mixtures of macromolecules and simpler components (e.g., microions, monomers, solvent) that can assemble into complex…
Colloidal systems find important applications ranging from fabrication of photonic crystals to direct probing of phenomena typically encountered in atomic crystals and glasses. New applications - such as nanoantennas, plasmonic sensors, and…
We study the dynamics of quasi-two-dimensional concentrated suspensions of colloidal particles in active gels by computer simulations. Remarkably, we find that activity induces a dynamic clustering of colloids even in the absence of any…
Active gel theory has recently been very successful in describing biologically active materials such as actin filaments or moving bacteria in temporally fixed and simple geometries such as cubes or spheres. Here we develop a computational…
Topological defects play a central role in the physics of many materials, including magnets, superconductors and liquid crystals. In active fluids, defects become autonomous particles that spontaneously propel from internal active stresses…
Collections of simple, self-propelled colloidal particles exhibit complex, emergent dynamical behavior, with promising applications in microrobotics. When confined within a deformable vesicle, self-propelled rods cluster and align,…
We study the scaling properties of forced folding of thin materials of different geometry. The scaling relations implying the topological crossovers from the folding of threedimensional plates to the folding of two-dimensional sheets, and…
Effective colloid-colloid interactions can be tailored through the addition of a complex cosolute. Here we investigate the case of a cosolute made by self-assembling patchy particles. Depending on the valence, these particles can form…
Compliant environments can mediate interactions between mechanically active cells like fibroblasts. Starting with a phenomenological model for the behaviour of single cells, we use extensive Monte Carlo simulations to predict non-trivial…
We demonstrate a novel route of spatially organizing the colloid arrangements on the polymer-grafted substrate by use of self-consistent field and density functional theories. We find that grafting of polymers onto a substrate can…
We study the swelling of a flexible linear chain composed of active particles by analytical theory and computer simulation. Three different situations are considered: a free chain, a chain confined to an external harmonic trap, and a chain…
Inspired by recent experiments on chromosomal dynamics, we introduce an exactly solvable model for the interaction between a flexible polymer and a set of motor-like enzymes. The enzymes can bind and unbind to specific sites of the polymer…
Active polymers are driven out of equilibrium by internal forces and exhibit conformational properties that differ fundamentally from those of passive chains. Here we study how spatially modulated tangential activity reshapes the…