Related papers: Sequence disorder-induced first order phase transi…
We report that a dielectric polymer chain, constrained at both ends, sharply collapses when exposed to a high electric field. The chain collapse is driven by nonlocal dipolar interactions and anisotropic polarization of monomers, a…
Disorder, though naturally present in experimental samples and strongly influencing a wide range of material phenomena, remains underexplored in first-principles studies due to the computational cost of sampling the large supercell and…
These lectures provide an introduction to the theory of disordered interacting electron systems. In particular, we concentrate on those aspects which are fundamental for the problem of the metal-insulator transition due to the interplay of…
The behavior of polyelectrolytes between charged surfaces immersed in semi-dilute solutions is investigated theoretically. A continuum mean field approach is used for calculating numerically concentration profiles between two electrodes…
We enumerate all minimal energy packings (MEPs) for small single linear and ring polymers composed of spherical monomers with contact attractions and hard-core repulsions, and compare them to corresponding results for monomer packings. We…
We study the effective interaction between differently charged polyelectrolyte-colloid complexes in electrolyte solutions via Monte Carlo simulations. These complexes are formed when short and flexible polyelectrolyte chains adsorb onto…
We investigate a novel variant of the exclusion process in which particles perform asymmetric nearest-neighbor jumps across a bond \((k, k+1)\) only if the preceding site \((k-1)\) is unoccupied. This next-nearest-neighbor constraint…
We investigate the effect of quenched surface charge disorder on electrostatic interactions between two charged surfaces in the presence of dielectric inhomogeneities and added salt. We show that in the linear weak-coupling regime (i.e., by…
We perform extensive molecular dynamics simulations of a highly charged flexible polyelectrolyte (PE) chain in a poor solvent for the case when the chain is in a collapsed state and the electrostatic interactions, characterized by the…
The transport of polyelectrolytes confined by oppositely charged surfaces and driven by a constant electric field is of interest in studies of DNA separation according to size. Using molecular dynamics simulations that include surface…
Electrochemical phenomena in biology often unfold in confined geometries where micrometer- to millimeter-scale domains coexist with nanometer-scale interfacial diffuse charge layers. We analyze a model lipid membrane-electrolyte system…
We show that when a self-avoiding polymer chain is pulled off a sticky surface by force applied to the end segment, it undergoes a first-order thermodynamic phase transition albeit without phase coexistence. This unusual feature is…
When liquid-crystalline elastomers pass through the isotropic-nematic transition, the orientational order parameter and the elastic strain vary rapidly but smoothly, without the expected first-order discontinuity. This broadening of the…
Similarly-charged polymers in solution, known as polyelectrolytes, are known to form aggregated structures in the presence of oppositely charged counterions. Understanding the dependence of the equilibrium phases and the dynamics of the…
We analyze the localized phase of a general model of a directed polymer in the proximity of an interface that separates two solvents. Each monomer unit carries a charge, $\omega_n$, that determines the type (attractive or repulsive) and the…
An eight-potential-well order-disorder ferroelectric model was presented and the phase transition was studied under the mean-field approximation. It was shown that the two-body interactions are able to account for the first-order and the…
We investigate the low-energy properties of the orthogonal-dimer spin chain characterized by a frustrated dimer-plaquette structure. When the competing antiferromagnetic couplings are varied, the first-order quantum phase transition occurs…
We present the results of extensive computer simulations performed on solutions of monodisperse charged rod-like polyelectrolytes in the presence of trivalent counterions. To overcome energy barriers we used a combination of parallel…
We study the reentrant condensation of polyelectrolytes in dilute solutions of small multivalent salts, whose phase-transition mechanism remains poorly understood. Motivated by recent full atomic simulation results reported by the Caltech…
We analyze the combined effect of the long range Coulomb (LRC) interaction and of surface energy on first order density-driven phase transitions in the presence of a compensating rigid background. We study mixed states formed by regions of…