Related papers: Solvent constraints for biopolymer folding and evo…
While fields like Artificial Life have made huge strides in quantifying the mechanisms that distinguish living systems from non-living ones, particular mechanisms remain difficult to reproduce in silico. Known as open-endedness, we've been…
A variety of complex fluids consist in soft, round objects (foams, emulsions, assemblies of copolymer micelles or of multilamellar vesicles -- also known as onions). Their dense packing induces a slight deviation from their prefered…
Continuum models to handle solvent and electrolyte effects in an effective way have a long tradition in quantum-chemistry simulations and are nowadays also being introduced in computational condensed-matter and materials simulations. A key…
Aims: The secondary atmospheres of terrestrial planets form and evolve as a consequence of interaction with the interior over geological time. We aim to quantify the influence of planetary bulk composition on the interior--atmosphere…
The presence of solvent tunes many properties of a molecule, such as its ground and excited state geometry, dipole moment, excitation energy, and absorption spectrum. Because the energy of the system will vary depending on the solvent…
Theoretical physical-chemical models for the formation of planetary systems depend on data quality for the Sun's composition, that of stars in the solar neighbourhood, and of the estimated "pristine" compositions for stellar systems. The…
We study the prospects for life on planets with subsurface oceans, and find that a wide range of planets can exist in diverse habitats with ice envelopes of moderate thickness. We quantify the energy sources available to these worlds, the…
Local minima and the saddle points separating them in the energy landscape are known to dominate the dynamics of biopolymer folding. Here we introduce a notion of a "folding funnel" that is concisely defined in terms of energy minima and…
Little is known about the interaction between atmospheres and crusts of exoplanets so far, but future space missions and ground-based instruments are expected to detect molecular features in the spectra of hot rocky exoplanets. We aim to…
Polymer networks and biological tissues are often swollen by a solvent, such that their properties emerge from a coupling between swelling and elastic stress. This poroelastic coupling becomes particularly intricate in wetting, adhesion,…
This paper analytically investigates the Darcy-Poisson-Nernst-Planck system. This system is a mathematical model for electrolyte solutions. In this paper, we consider electrolyte solutions, which consist of a neutral fluid and two suspended…
When injected through a contraction, high molecular weight polymer solutions exhibit a sharp increase of apparent viscosity which originates from stretching polymer chains above a critical extension rate. This chain stretching can also…
Complex systems throughout Nature display structures and functions that are built and maintained, at least in part, by optimal energies flowing through them--not specific, ideal values, rather ranges in energy rate density below which…
Free-floating planets (FFPs) can result from dynamical scattering processes happening in the first few million years of a planetary system's life. Several models predict the possibility, for these isolated planetary-mass objects, to retain…
The search for signs of life through the detection of exoplanet atmosphere biosignature gases is gaining momentum. Yet, only a handful of rocky exoplanet atmospheres are suitable for observation with planned next-generation telescopes. To…
We show that the available constraints relating to $^{6}$LiBeB Galactic evolution can be accounted for by the so-called superbubble model, according to which particles are efficiently accelerated inside superbubbles out of a mixture of…
We apply the computational methodology of phase retrieval to the problem of folding heteropolymers. The ground state fold of the polymer is defined by the intersection of two sets in the configuration space of its constituent monomers: a…
The aim of my dissertation is to investigate habitability in extra-Solar Systems. Most of the time, only planets are considered as possible places where extraterrestrial life can emerge and evolve, however, their moons could be inhabited,…
How can scientists conclude with high confidence that an exoplanet hosts life? As telescopes come on line over the next 20 years that can directly observe photons from terrestrial exoplanets, this question will dictate the activities of…
The diffusion of molecules (penetrants) of variable size, shape, and chemistry through dense crosslinked polymer networks is a fundamental scientific problem that is broadly relevant in materials, polymer, physical and biological chemistry.…