Related papers: Shape and Size Tunability of Sheets of Interlocked…
The thermal properties of coarse grained knotted polymers containing two kinds of monomers $A$ and $B$ fluctuating in a solution are investigated on a simple cubic lattice using the Wang-Landau MC algorithm. These knots have a more complex…
The discovery of topological insulators and semimetals has opened up a new perspective to understand materials. Owing to the special band structure and enlarged Berry curvature, the linear responses are strongly enhanced in topological…
Topological entanglements in polymers are mimicked by sliding rings (slip-links) which enforce pair contacts between monomers. We study the force-extension curve for linear polymers in which slip-links create additional loops of variable…
We propose a class of linear elastic three-dimensional metamaterials for which the effective parameters bulk modulus and mass density can be adjusted independently over a large range|which is not possible for ordinary materials. First, we…
Molecular dynamic simulation enables one to correlate the evolution of the micro-structure with anisotropic stress when a material is subject to strain. The anisotropic stress due to a constant strain-rate load in a cross-linked polymer is…
Gyroscopic metamaterials --- mechanical structures composed of interacting spinning tops --- have recently been found to support one-way topological edge excitations. In these structures, the time reversal symmetry breaking that enables…
We study experimentally a coiling instability of cylindrical multilamellar stacks of phospholipid membranes, induced by polymers with hydrophobic anchors grafted along their hydrophilic backbone. Our system is unique in that coils form in…
The conformational statistics of ring polymers in melts or dense solutions is strongly affected by their quenched microscopic topological state. The effect is particularly strong for non-concatenated unknotted rings, which are known to…
Mechanical metamaterials are periodic lattice structures with complex unit cell architectures that can achieve extraordinary mechanical properties beyond the capability of bulk materials. A new class of metamaterials is proposed, whose…
Polymer chains immersed in different solvent molecules exhibit diverse properties due to multiple spatiotemporal scales and complex interactions. Using molecular dynamics simulations, we study the conformational and static properties of…
Under high cylindrical confinement, segments of ring polymers can be localized along the long axis of the cylinder by introducing internal loops within the ring polymer. The emergent organization of the polymer segments occurs because of…
Indentation is a common experimental technique to study the mechanics of polymeric materials. The main advantage of using indentation is because this provides a direct correlation between the microstructure and the small-scale mechanical…
Extensive molecular simulations are applied to characterize the equilibrium dynamics, entanglement topology, and nonlinear extensional rheology of symmetric ring-linear polymer blends with systematically varied ring fraction $\phi_R$.…
We create mechanical metamaterials whose response to uniaxial compression can be programmed by lateral confinement, allowing monotonic, non-monotonic and hysteretic behavior. These functionalities arise from a broken rotational symmetry…
The interplay of topological constraints and Coulomb interactions in static and dynamic properties of charged polymers is investigated by numerical simulations and scaling arguments. In the absence of screening, the long-range interaction…
A flat sheet programmed with a planar pattern of spontaneous shape change will morph into a curved surface. Such metric mechanics is seen in growing biological sheets, and may be engineered in actuating soft matter sheets such as…
We demonstrate that tunable attractive (bonding) and repulsive (anti-bonding) forces can arise in highly asymmetric structures coupled to external radiation, a consequence of the bonding/anti-bonding level repulsion of guided-wave…
Chiral polymers are ubiquitous in nature and in the cellular context they are often found in association with membranes. Here we show that surface bound polymers with an intrinsic twist and anisotropic bending stiffness can exhibit a sharp…
Self-healing polymers crosslinked by solely reversible bonds are intrinsically weaker than common covalently crosslinked networks. Introducing covalent crosslinks into a reversible network would improve mechanical strength. It is…
The mechanics of complex soft matter often cannot be understood in the classical physical frame of flexible polymers or rigid rods. The underlying constituents are semiflexible polymers, whose finite bending stiffness ($\kappa$) leads to…