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Throughout the physical sciences, entropy stands out as a pivotal but enigmatic concept that, in materials design, often takes a backseat to energy. Here, we demonstrate how to precisely engineer entropy to achieve desired colloidal…
Ring polymers are prevalent in natural and engineered systems, including circular bacterial DNA, crown ethers for cation chelation, and mechanical nanoswitches. The morphology and dynamics of ring polymers are governed by the chemistry and…
Entropy is a fundamental thermodynamic quantity that is a measure of the accessible microstates available to a system, with the stability of a system determined by the magnitude of the total entropy of the system. This is valid across truly…
Entropy is a central concept in physics, but can be challenging to calculate even for systems that are easily simulated. This is exacerbated out of equilibrium, where generally little is known about the distribution characterizing simulated…
Accurate characterization of entropy plays a pivotal role in capturing reversible and irreversible heating in supercapacitors during charging/discharging cycles. However, numerical methods that can faithfully capture entropy variation in…
Multivalent particles bind to targets via many independent ligand-receptor bonding interactions. This microscopic design spans length scales in both synthetic and biological systems. Classic examples include interactions between cells,…
Over recent years, molecular simulations have provided invaluable insights into the microscopic processes governing the initial stages of crystal nucleation and growth. A key aspect that has been observed in many different systems is the…
A toy model of particles packings is presented, which consists in arranging hexagons on a triangular lattice according to local stability rules. The number of stable packings is analytically computed and found to grow exponentially with the…
The concept of entropy in nonequilibrium macroscopic systems is investigated in the light of an extended equation of motion for the density matrix obtained in a previous study. It is found that a time-dependent information entropy can be…
The pattern of isentropes in the vicinity of a first-order phase transition is proposed as a key for a sub-classification. While the confinement--deconfinement transition, conjectured to set in beyond a critical end point in the QCD phase…
We propose a two-dimensional model for the organization of stabilized microtubules driven by molecular motors in an unconfined geometry. In this model two kinds of dynamics are competing. The first one is purely diffusive, with an…
Recent theoretical progress in nonequilibrium thermodynamics, linking the physical principle of Maximum Entropy Production ("MEP") to the information-theoretical "MaxEnt" principle of scientific inference, together with conjectures from…
We employ the k-th nearest-neighbor estimator of configurational entropy in order to decode within a parameter-free numerical approach the complex high-order structural correlations in fluxional molecules going beyond the usual linear,…
We introduce a simple physical picture to explain the process of molecular sorting, whereby specific proteins are concentrated and distilled into submicrometric lipid vesicles in eukaryotic cells. To this purpose, we formulate a model based…
Polymerases select nucleotides before incorporating them for chemical synthesis during gene replication or transcription. How the selection proceeds stepwise efficiently to achieve sufficiently high fidelity and speed is essential for…
Colloidal systems offer the ideal conditions to study the nucleation process, both from an experimental viewpoint, due to their relative large size and long time-scales, and from a modeling point of view, due to the tunability of their…
Fueled by the hydrolysis of ATP, the motor protein kinesin literally walks on two legs along the biopolymer microtubule. The number of accidental backsteps that kinesin takes appears to be much larger than what one would expect given the…
We find numerically that the sample to sample fluctuation of the entropy, $\Delta S$, is a tool more sensitive in distinguishing how from high temperature behaviors, than the corresponding fluctuation in the free energy. In 1+1 dimensions…
Active emulsions and liquid crystalline shells are intriguing and experimentally realisable types of topological matter. Here we numerically study the morphology and spatiotemporal dynamics of a double emulsion, where one or two passive…
Phase separation, crucial for spatially segregating biomolecules in cells, is well-understood in the simple case of a few components with pairwise interactions. Yet, biological cells challenge the simple picture in at least two ways: First,…