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Recent theoretical studies have predicted a new clustering mechanism for soft matter particles that interact via a certain kind of purely repulsive, bounded potentials. At sufficiently high densities, clusters of overlapping particles are…
We calculate the ion and composition distributions around colloid particles in an aqueous mixture, accounting for preferential adsorption, electrostatic interaction, selective solvation among ions and polar molecules, and…
Ionic liquids have generated interest in applications as lubricants and as additives to conventional lubricants due to their unique physical properties. In these applications, the liquid thin film can be subjected simultaneously to…
Functoinal polymers can be used as electrolyte and binder materials in solid-state batteries. This often requires performance targets in terms of both transport and mechanical properties. In this work, a model ionic conductive polymer…
Solvent evaporation in soft matter solutions (solutions of colloidal particles, polymers and their mixtures) is an important process in material making and in printing and coating industries. The solvent evaporation process determines the…
We explore interactions between equally charged surfaces, in the presence of simple salt and either neutral or monovalently charged polyampholytes. We consider the possibility of using these charged polymers as crude models of ion clusters.…
Discovering new superionic materials is essential for advancing solid-state batteries, which offer improved energy density and safety compared to the traditional lithium-ion batteries with liquid electrolytes. Conventional computational…
Next-generation high-efficiency Li-ion batteries require an electrolyte that is both safe and thermally stable. A possible choice for high performance all-solid-state Li-ion batteries is a liquid crystal, which possesses properties…
The electrostatic double layer force is key to determining the stability and self-assembly of charged colloids and many other soft matter systems. Fully understanding the attractive force between two like-charged surfaces remains a great…
The experimentally observed swelling and collapse response of weakly charged polymers to the addition of specific salts displays quite convoluted behavior that is not easy to categorize. Here we use a minimalistic implicit solvent /…
Molten salts are crucial for clean energy applications, yet exploring their thermophysical properties across diverse chemical space remains challenging. We present the development of a machine learning interatomic potential (MLIP) called…
Colloidal particles dispersed in liquid crystals can form new materials with tunable elastic and electro-optic properties. In a periodic `blue phase' host, particles should template into colloidal crystals with potential uses in photonics,…
Lithium-salt-based deep eutectic solvents, where the only cation is Li+, are promising candidates as electrolytes in electrochemical energy-storage devices like batteries. We have performed broadband dielectric spectroscopy on three such…
Molecular dynamics simulations have been performed on pure liquid water, aqueous solutions of sodium chloride, and polymer solutions exposed to a strong external electric field with the goal to gain molecular insight into the structural…
Electrostatic interactions fundamentally govern the structure and transport of electrolytes. In concentrated electrolytes, however, electrostatic and steric correlations, together with ion-solvent coupling, give rise to complex behavior,…
Supersolidity - simultaneous superfluid flow and crystalline order - has been realized in quantum atomic systems but remains unexplored in purely photonic platforms operating at weak light-matter coupling. We predict a supersolid phase of…
Enormous enhancement in the viscosity of a liquid near its glass transition is generally connected to the growing many-body static correlations near the transition, often coined as `amorphous ordering'. Estimating the length scales of such…
Numerous soft materials jam into an amorphous solid at high packing fraction. This non-equilibrium phase transition is best understood in the context of a model system in which particles repel elastically when they overlap. Recently,…
Soft materials such as colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions and liquid crystals are constituted by mesoscopic entities held together by weak forces. Their mechanical moduli are several orders of magnitude lower than those of atomic…
A number of basic scientific questions relating to ion conduction in homogeneously disordered solids are discussed. The questions deal with how to define the mobile ion density, what can be learned from electrode effects, what is the ion…