Related papers: Interplay between self-assembly and phase separati…
We study the phase behaviour of a binary mixture of colloidal hard spheres and freely-jointed chains of beads using Monte Carlo simulations. Recently Panagiotopoulos and coworkers predicted [Nat. Commun. 5, 4472 (2014)] that the hexagonal…
We have performed multicanonical chain-growth simulations of a polymer interacting with an adsorbing surface. The polymer, which is not explicitly anchored at the surface, experiences a hierarchy of phase transitions between conformations…
We discuss the relation between the emergence of new phases with broken symmetry within the framework of simple models of biopolymers. We start with a classic model for a chain molecule of spherical beads tethered together, with the steric…
Recent advances in Generalized Ensemble simulations and microcanonical analysis allowed the investigation of structural transitions in polymer models over a broad range of local bending and torsion strengths. It is reasonable to argue that…
The cellular cytoplasm is organized into compartments. Phase separation is a simple manner to create membrane-less compartments in order to confine and localize particles like proteins. In many cases these particles are bound to fluctuating…
Polymer blends offer an exciting material for various potential applications due to their tunable properties by varying constituting components and their relative composition. Our simulation results unravel an intrinsic relationship between…
In this paper we study a model describing a copolymer in a micro-emulsion. The copolymer consists of a random concatenation of hydrophobic and hydrophilic monomers, the micro-emulsion consists of large blocks of oil and water arranged in a…
When non-adsorbing polymers are added to an isotropic suspension of rod-like colloids, the colloids effectively attract each other via depletion forces. We performed Monte Carlo simulations to study the phase diagram of such rod-polymer…
Recent theoretical studies found that mixtures of active and passive colloidal particles phase separate but only at very high activity ratio. The high value poses serious obstacles for experimental exploration of this phenomenon. Here we…
The associative interaction, such as hydrogen bonding, can bring about versatile functionalities to polymer systems, which has been investigated by tremendous researches, but the fundamental understanding on association process is still…
We study the self-assembly behaviour of patchy particles with `protein-like' interactions that can be considered as a minimal model for the assembly of viral capsids and other shell-like protein complexes. We thoroughly explore the…
In geometrically frustrated assemblies, equilibrium self-limitation manifests in the form of a minimum in the free energy per subunit at a finite, multi-subunit size which results from the competition between the elastic costs of…
The thermally assisted detachment of a self-avoiding polymer chain from an adhesive surface by an external force applied to one of the chain ends is investigated. We perform our study in the "fixed height" statistical ensemble where one…
We make use of the previously developed formalism for a monomer ensemble and include angular dependence of the segments of the polymer chains thus described. In particular we show how to deal with stiffness when the polymer chain is…
Molecular dynamics simulations are used to study the phase behavior of linear multiblock copolymers with two types of monomers, A and B, where the length of the polymer blocks $N_{A}$ and $N_{B}$ ($N_{A}=N_{B}=N$), the number of the blocks…
Chemically-responsive polymers are macromolecules that respond to local variations of the chemical composition of the solution by changing their conformation, with notable examples including polyelectrolytes, proteins and DNA. The polymer…
In this chapter we review the rich behavior of polymer chains embedded in a quenched random environment. We first consider the problem of a Gaussian chain free to move in a random potential with short-ranged correlations. We derive the…
We study numerically a model of non-aligning self-propelled particles interacting through steric repulsion, which was recently shown to exhibit active phase separation in two dimensions in the absence of any attractive interaction or…
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…
A polymer chain tethered to a surface may be compact or extended, adsorbed or desorbed, depending on interactions with the surface and the surrounding solvent. This leads to a rich phase diagram with a variety of transitions. To investigate…