Related papers: Symmetry-Breaking and Self-Sorting in Block Copoly…
Shape anisotropy of colloidal nanoparticles has emerged as an important design variable for engineering assemblies with targeted structure and properties. In particular, a number of polyhedral nanoparticles have been shown to exhibit a rich…
We examine the symmetry-breaking effect of fixed constellations of particles on the surface-directed spinodal decomposition of binary blends in the presence of particles whose surfaces have a preferential affinity for one of the components.…
We explore the shape and internal structure of diblock copolymer (di-BCP) nanoparticles (NPs) by using the Ginzburg-Landau free-energy expansion. The self-assembly of di-BCP lamellae confined in emulsion droplets can form either ellipsoidal…
Polymer-grafted nanoparticles are versatile building blocks that self-assemble into a rich diversity of mesostructures. Coarse-grained molecular simulations have commonly accompanied experiments by resolving structure formation pathways and…
During the last 3 years, our group has investigated extensively the complexation mechanism between neutral-polyelectrolyte block copolymers with oppositely charged species. These species are surfactant micelles, multivalent counterions and…
The self-assembly of binary nanoparticle superlattices from colloidal mixtures is a promising method for the fabrication of complex colloidal co-crystal structures. However, binary mixtures often form amorphous or metastable phases instead…
Polymeric single-chain nanoparticles (SCNPs) are soft nano-objects synthesized by purely intramolecular cross-linking of single polymer chains. By means of computer simulations, we investigate the conformational properties of SCNPs as a…
The packing geometry of macromolecules in complex mesophases is of key importance to self-organization in synthetic and biological soft materials. While approximate or heuristic models rely on often-untested assumptions about how flexible…
Multilevel self-assembly involving small structured groups of nano-particles provides new routes to development of functional materials with a sophisticated architecture. Apart from the inter-particle forces, the geometrical shapes and…
Single-chain nanoparticles (SCNP) are a new class of bio and soft-matter polymeric objects in which a fraction of the monomers are able to form equivalently intra- or inter-polymer bonds. Here we numerically show that a fully-entropic…
Geometric frustration is a widespread phenomenon in physics, materials science, and biology, occurring when the geometry of a system prevents local interactions from being all accommodated. The resulting manifold of nearly degenerate…
We use molecular dynamics simulations to study a semidilute, unentangled polymer solution containing well dispersed, weakly attractive nanoparticles (NP) of size ($\sigma_N$) smaller than the polymer radius of gyration $R_g$. We find that…
We investigated the relative stability of the amorphous vs crystalline nanoparticles of size ranging between 0.8 and 1.8 nm. We found that, at variance from bulk systems, at low T small nanoparticles are amorphous and they undergo to an…
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…
Over the past two decades polymer nanocomposites have received tremendous interest from industry and academia due to their advanced properties comparative to polymer blends. Many computational studies have revealed that the macroscopic…
Molecular building blocks interacting at the nanoscale organize spontaneously into stable mono- layers that display intriguing long-range ordering motifs on the surface of atomic substrates. The patterning process, if appropriately…
Spontaneous self-assembly in molecular systems is a fundamental route to both biological and engineered soft matter. Simple micellisation, emulsion formation, and polymer mixing principles are well understood. However, the principles behind…
The phase behavior of symmetric diblock copolymers under three-dimensional (3D) soft confinement is investigated using the self-consistent field theory. The soft confinement is realized in binary blends composed AB diblock copolymers and C…
The statistical theory of polymers tethered around the inner surface of a cylindrical channel has traditionally employed the assumption that the equilibrium density of the polymers is independent of the azimuthal coordinate. However,…
We present NanoImprint lithography experiments and modeling of thin films of block copolymers (BCP). The NanoImprint lithography is used to align perpendicularly lamellar phases, over distances much larger than the natural lamellar…