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A novel energy landscape model, ELM, for proteins recently explained a collection of incoherent, elastic neutron scattering data from proteins. The ELM of proteins considers the elastic response of the proton and its environment to the…
We numerically study the multi-scale properties of a 2d active gel to address the energy transfer mechanism. We find that activity is able to excite long-ranged distortions of the nematic pattern giving rise to spontaneous laminar flows and…
Nematic elastomers are a particular class of liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) that exhibit both liquid-crystalline order and rubber (entropic) elasticity. This combination makes them stimuli-responsive soft materials with a number of…
The impact of confinement on self-assembly of particles interacting with short-range attraction and long-range repulsion (SALR) potential is studied for thermodynamic states corresponding to local ordering of clusters or layers in the bulk.…
The Langevin dynamics of a self - interacting chain embedded in a quenched random medium is investigated by making use of the generating functional method and one - loop (Hartree) approximation. We have shown how this intrinsic disorder…
Nonlinear elastic responses of short and stiff polyelectrolytes are investigated by dynamic simulations on a single molecule level. When a polyelectrolyte condensate undergoes a mechanical unfolding, two types of force-extension curves,…
We present a detailed study of the static and dynamic behavior of long semiflexible polymer chains in a melt. Starting from previously obtained fully equilibrated high molecular weight polymer melts [{\it Zhang et al.} ACS Macro Lett. 3,…
A robust non-Newtonian fluid model of dilute polyelectrolyte solutions is derived from kinetic theory arguments. Polyelectrolyte molecules are modeled as finitely elongated nonlinear elastic dumbbells, where effective charges (interacting…
Identifying heterogeneous structures in glasses --- such as localized soft spots --- and understanding structure-dynamics relations in these systems remain major scientific challenges. Here we derive an exact expression for the local…
Strain energy density is calculated for a network of flexible chains with weak excluded-volume interactions (whose energy is small compared with thermal energy). Constitutive equations are developed for an incompressible network of chains…
Using Langevin dynamics complemented by Wang-Landau Monte Carlo simulations, we study the phase behavior of single and multiple semiflexible polymer chains in solution under poor-solvent conditions. In the case of a single chain, we obtain…
The resistance to fracture of reversible biopolymer hydrogels is an important control factor of the cutting/slicing and eating characteristics of food gels. It is also critical for their utilization in tissue engineering, for which…
There have been separate studies of the polymer collapse transition, where the collapse was induced by two different types of attraction. In each case, the configurations of the polymer were given by the same subset of random walks being…
We study equilibrium configurations of non-Euclidean plates, in which the reference metric is uniaxially periodic. This work is motivated by recent experiments on thin sheets of composite thermally responsive gels [1]. Such sheets bend…
Inspired from an experimentally examined organic conductor, a novel mechanism for negative magnetoresistance is proposed for repulsively interacting electrons on a lattice whose band dispersion contains a flat portion (a flat bottom below a…
Mechanisms of locomotion in microscopic systems are of great interest not only for technological applications, but also for the sake of understanding, and potentially harnessing, processes far from thermal equilibrium. Down-scaling is a…
Nanoscale polymeric thin films are widely used in diverse applications such as energy devices, flexible electronics and biosensors, where a satisfactory mechanical performance is of vital importance to realize their full functionality. It…
We numerically study the energy transfer in a multi-component $2d$ film, made of an active polar gel and a passive isotropic fluid in presence of surfactant favoring emulsification. We show that by confining the active behavior into the…
We report on a computational study of the statics and dynamics of long flexible linear polymers that spontaneously knot and unknot. Specifically, the equilibrium self-entanglement properties, such as the knotting probability, knot length…
Motivated by the motion of nematode sperm cells, we present a model for the motion of an adhesive gel on a solid substrate. The gel polymerizes at the leading edge and depolymerizes at the rear. The motion results from a competition between…