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Supercooled liquids are characterized by relaxation times that increase dramatically by cooling or compression. Many liquids have been shown to obey power-law density scaling, according to which the relaxation time is a function of density…
We study the interplay between entropy and topological constraints for a polymer chain in which sliding rings (slip-links) enforce pair contacts between monomers. These slip-links divide a closed ring polymer into a number of sub-loops…
The phenomenon of drag reduction by polymer additives had been studied in simulations on the basis of non-Newtonian fluid mechanical models that take into account the field of polymer extension (conformation tensor) and its interaction with…
We introduce an exactly solvable statistical-mechanical model of the hydration of non-polar compounds, based on grouping water molecules in clusters where hydrogen bonds and isotropic interactions occur; interactions between clusters are…
Biological systems commonly combine intrinsically out-of-equilibrium active components with passive polymeric inclusions to produce unique material properties. To explore these composite systems, idealized models - such as polymers in…
The conformations of semiflexible (bio)polymers are studied in flow through geometrically structured microchannels. Using mesoscale hydrodynamics simulations, we show that the polymer undergoes a rod-to-helix transition as it moves from the…
Water keeps puzzling scientists because of its numerous properties which behave oppositely to usual liquids: for instance, water expands upon cooling, and liquid water is denser than ice. To explain this anomalous behaviour, several…
Solutions of semiflexible polymers confined by repulsive planar walls are studied by density functional theory and Molecular Dynamics simulations, to clarify the competition between the chain alignment favored by the wall and the depletion…
Despite the use of glasses for thousands of years, the nature of the glass transition is still mysterious. On approaching the glass transition, the growth of dynamic heterogeneity has long been thought to play a key role in explaining the…
We consider the escape of a flexible, self-avoiding polymer chain out of a confined geometry. By means of simulations, we demonstrate that the translocation time can be described by a simple scaling law that exhibits a nonlinear dependence…
Minute amount of long chain flexible polymer dissolved in a turbulent flow can drastically change flow properties, such as reducing the drag and enhancing mixing. One fundamental riddle is how these polymer additives interact with the…
Gelatin is often used as an analog for studying soft and biological materials in order to understand the mechanics of behavior of biological tissue in events like traumatic brain injuries. The material properties of gelatin change with the…
Motivated by the finding that there is some biological universality in the relationship between school geometry and school biomass of various pelagic fishes in various conditions, I here establish a scaling law for school dimensions: the…
Processes on different length scales affect the dynamics of chain molecules. In this work, we focus on structures on the scale of a monomer and investigate polyolefins, i.e. hydrocarbon chains with different small scale architectures. We…
We extend classical Flory-Rehner theory for the expansion and compression of porous materials such as cross-linked polymer networks. The theory includes volume exclusion, affinity with the solvent, and finite stretching of the polymer…
Hydrogels hold promise in agriculture as reservoirs of water in dry soil, potentially alleviating the burden of irrigation. However, confinement in soil can markedly reduce the ability of hydrogels to absorb water and swell, limiting their…
Hydrogels are promising systems for separation applications due to their structural characteristics (i.e. hydrophilicity and porosity). In our study, we investigate the permeation of suspensions of rigid latex particles of different sizes…
Glass-like materials are nonequilibrium systems where the relaxation time may exceed reasonable time scales of observations. In the present paper a dynamic percolation model is introduced in order to explain the principal properties of…
A comprehensive, semi-quantitative model for the thermodynamics of hydrophobic solvation is presented. The model is based on a very simple premise suggested by the scaled particle theory and treats both solute and solvent molecules as hard…
Motivated by recent cold atom experiments, we study the relaxation of spin helices in quantum XXZ spin chains. The experimentally observed relaxation of spin helices follows scaling laws that are qualitatively different from linear-response…