Related papers: Direct imaging of polymer filaments pulled from re…
The stretching of viscoelastic polymer solutions close to break-up can create attached drops on a filament, whose properties and dynamics are little understood. The stretching of capillary bridges and the consecutive filament, until its…
We systematically explore the self-assembly of semi-flexible polymers in deformable spherical confinement across a wide regime of chain stiffness, contour lengths and packing fractions by means of coarse-grained molecular dynamics…
The transport of deformable particles through porous media underlies a wealth of applications ranging from filtration to oil recovery to the transport and spreading of biological agents. Using direct numerical simulations, we analyze the…
At the cutting edge of materials science, matter is designed to self-organize into structures that perform a wide range of functions. The past two decades have witnessed major innovations in the versatility of building blocks, ranging from…
The folding transition of biopolymers from the coil to compact structures has attracted wide research interest in the past and is well studied in polymer physics. Recent seminal works on DNA in confined devices have shown that these long…
A rectangular grid formed by liquid filaments on a partially wetting substrate evolves in a series of breakups leading to arrays of drops with different shapes distributed in a rather regular bidimensional pattern. Our study is focused on…
We study the mechanical stiffening behavior in two-dimensional (2D) cross-linked networks of semiflexible biopolymer filaments under simple shear. Filamental constituents immersed in a fluid undergo thermally excited bending motions.…
An important goal of self-assembly is to achieve a preprogrammed structure with high fidelity. Here, we control the valence of DNA-functionalized emulsions to make linear and branched model polymers, or `colloidomers'. The distribution of…
A fluid dynamics video of the break up of a droplet of saliva is shown. First a viscoelastic filament is formed and than the blistering of this filament is shown. Finally, a flow induced phase separation takes place nanometer sized solid…
DNA is now firmly established as a versatile and robust platform for achieving synthetic nanostructures. While the folding of single molecules into complex structures is routinely achieved through engineering basepair sequences, much less…
The fragmentation of filaments in molecular clouds has attracted a lot of attention as there seems to be a relation between the evolution of filaments and star formation. The study of the fragmentation process has been motivated by simple…
Many of the cell membrane vital functions are achieved by the self-organization of the proteins and biopolymers embedded in it. The protein dynamics are in part determined by its drag. A large number of these proteins can polymerize to form…
Polymer composites are ubiquitous in biology and industry alike, owing to their emergent desirable mechanical properties not attainable in single-species systems. At the same time, polymer topology has been shown to play a key role in…
The question of how stiff polymers are able to pack into small containers is particularly relevant to the study of DNA packaging in viruses. A reduced version of the problem based on coarse-grained representations of the main components of…
Semiflexible polymers form central structures in biological material. Modeling approaches usually neglect influences of polymer-specific molecular features aiming to describe semiflexible polymers universally. Here, we investigate the…
From multicellular tissues to bacterial colonies, three dimensional cellular structures arise through the interaction of cellular activities and mechanical forces. Simple bacterial communities provide model systems for analyzing such…
We present a new method to identify large scale filaments and apply it to a cosmological simulation. Using positions of haloes above a given mass as node tracers, we look for filaments between them using the positions and masses of all the…
Rigid particles pack into structures, such as sand dunes on the beach, whose overall stability is determined by the average number of contacts between particles. However, when packing spatially extended objects with flexible shapes,…
Understanding interactions between microparticles and lipid membranes is of increasing importance, especially for unraveling the influence of microplastics on our health and environment. Here, we study how a short-ranged adhesive force…
Semiflexible polymers are ubiquitous in natural and artificial systems, where their intermediate rigidity gives rise to rich structural and dynamical behavior. Confinement plays a central role in these behaviors, as spatial restrictions can…