Related papers: Microphase separation in neutral homopolymer blend…
Nanoprecipitation, the rapid solvent-displacement route to nanoscale phase separation, has matured from a simple batch operation into a versatile platform for nanomaterial synthesis. This review synthesizes recent progress in…
The uptake and sorption of charged molecules by responsive polymer membranes and hydrogels in aqueous solutions is of key importance for the development of soft functional materials. Here we investigate the partitioning of simple monoatomic…
Microalloying elements tend to segregate to the matrix-precipitate phase boundaries to reduce the interfacial energy. The segregation mechanism is emerging as a novel design strategy for developing precipitation-hardened alloys with…
Adding a non-adsorbing polymer to passive colloids induces an attraction between the particles via the `depletion' mechanism. High enough polymer concentrations lead to phase separation. We combine experiments, theory and simulations to…
The self-assembly of copolymeric vesicles and micelles in micromixers is studied by External Potential Dynamics (EPD) simulations -- a dynamic density functional approach that explicitly accounts for the polymer architecture both at the…
The possibility to induce demixing in a colloidal mixture by adding small polymers, or other equivalent depletant agents, is theoretically investigated. By use of Mean Field Theory, suitably generalized to deal with short range effective…
Solid polymer electrolytes (SPEs) are ion-containing solid materials composed of a polymer matrix that enables ionic transport while maintaining the mechanical stability. The conventional wisdom is that for a high ion concentration, ions…
In this review, we address the issue of the electrostatic complexation between charged-neutral diblock copolymers and oppositely charged nanocolloids. We show that nanocolloids such as surfactant micelles and iron oxide magnetic…
We study the thermodynamic behavior of nonpolar liquid mixtures in the vicinity of curved charged objects, such as electrodes or charged colloids. For small enough charge on the object, or equivalently, small potential, the…
Partitioning of (bio)materials in polymeric mixtures is a key phenomenon both in cellular environments, as well as in industrial applications. In cells, several macromolecules are suspended within different biomolecular phases. On the other…
Proteins and nucleic acids can spontaneously self-assemble into membraneless droplet-like compartments, both in vitro and in vivo. A key component of these droplets are multi-valent proteins that possess several adhesive domains with…
Colloidal suspensions with free polymer coils which are larger than the colloidal particles are considered. The polymer-colloid interaction is modeled by an extension of the Asakura-Oosawa model. Phase separation occurs into dilute and…
Phase separation may be driven by the minimization of a suitable free energy ${\cal F}$. This is the case, e.g., for diblock copolimer melts, where ${\cal F}$ is minimized by a steady periodic pattern whose wavelength $\lambda_{GS}$ depends…
We develop a model of interacting zwitterionic membranes with rotating surface dipoles immersed in a monovalent salt, and implement it in a field theoretic formalism. In the mean-field regime of monovalent salt, the electrostatic forces…
The phase behaviour of amphiphilic multiblock copolymers with a large number of blocks in semidilute solutions is studied by lattice Monte Carlo simulations. The influence on the resulting structures of the concentration, the solvent…
Solvation of ions is ubiquitous on our planet. Solvated ions have a profound effect on the behavior of ionic solutions, which is crucial in nature and technology. Experimentally, ions have been classified into "structure makers" or…
In many biopolymer solutions, attractive interactions that stabilize finite-sized clusters at low concentrations also promote phase separation at high concentrations. Here we study a model biopolymer system that exhibits the opposite…
The dynamics of polymeric salt solutions are presented. The salt consists of chains $\rm A$ and $\rm B$, which are chemically different and interact with a Flory-interaction parameter $\chi$, the $\rm A$ chain ends carry a positive charge…
We theoretically study mixtures of chemically-interacting particles, which produce or consume a chemical to which they are attracted or repelled, in the most general case of many coexisting species. We find a new class of active phase…
Swimming cells often have to self-propel through fluids displaying non-Newtonian rheology. While past theoretical work seems to indicate that stresses arising from complex fluids should systematically hinder low-Reynolds number locomotion,…