Related papers: Anomalous Long-range Hard-wall Repulsion between P…
Solutions of semiflexible polymers confined by repulsive planar walls are studied by density functional theory and Molecular Dynamics simulations, to clarify the competition between the chain alignment favored by the wall and the depletion…
The collapse and swelling behavior of a generic homopolymer is studied using implicit-solvent, explicit-cosolvent Langevin dynamics computer simulations for varying interaction strengths. The systematic investigation reveals that polymer…
Biomolecular condensates formed through the phase separation of proteins and nucleic acids are widely observed, offering a fundamental means of organizing intracellular materials in a membrane-less fashion. Traditionally, these condensates…
The influence of poor solvent quality on fluid demixing of a model mixture of colloids and nonadsorbing polymers is investigated using density functional theory. The colloidal particles are modelled as hard spheres and the polymer coils as…
The depletion interaction between two parallel repulsive walls confining a dilute solution of long and flexible polymer chains is studied by field-theoretic methods. Special attention is paid to self-avoidance between chain monomers…
Equilibration of polymer melts containing highly entangled long polymer chains in confinement or with free surfaces is a challenge for computer simulations. We approach this problem by first studying polymer melts based on the soft-sphere…
Polymer behavior in mixed solvents often exhibits intriguing phenomena, such as cosolvency, where a polymer that collapses in two individually poor solvents becomes soluble in their mixture. In this study, we employ a combination of…
We report Monte Carlo results for the fluid structure of a system of dimeric particles interacting via a core-softened potential. More specifically, dimers interact through a repulsive pair potential of inverse-power form, modified in such…
Polymer brushes normally swell in a good solvent and collapse in a poor solvent. An abnormal response of polymer brushes, so-called co-nonsolvency, is the phenomenon where the brush counter-intuitively collapses in a good solvent mixture.…
The behavior of colloidal particles with a hard core and a soft shell has attracted the attention for researchers in the physical-chemistry interface not only due the large number of applications, but due the unique properties of these…
The formation of (bio)molecular condensates via liquid-liquid phase separation in cells has received increasing attention, as these coacervates play important functional and regulatory roles within biological systems. However, the majority…
We present the first analytic theory with elegant and closed-form analytical solutions to explore the cosolvency effect in polymer brushes, where polymer chains that are poorly soluble in two pure solvents become fully soluble in certain…
We present evidence that the concurrent existence of two populations of particles with different effective diameters is not a prerequisite for the occurrence of anomalous phase behaviors in systems of particles interacting through…
We investigated the influence of short- and long-range correlated quenched disorder introduced into the medium on the process of adsorption of long-flexible polymer chains on a wall by using the field theoretical approach in $d=4-\epsilon$…
Long-range interactions are ubiquitous in nature, where they are mediated by diffusive fields at the cellular scale or by visual cues for groups of animals. Short-range forces, which are paradigmatic in physics, can thus often be neglected…
Biomolecular condensates organize biochemical processes by spatially concentrating molecules while allowing for dynamic exchange with their surroundings. However, transport across their interface can be strongly attenuated, leading to…
We report a numerical study of equilibrium phase-diagrams and interfacial properties of bulk and confined colloid-polymer mixtures using grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations. Colloidal particles are treated as hard spheres, while the…
Strong coupling phenomena, such as the like charged macroions attraction, opposite charged macroions repulsion, charge renormalization or charge inversion, are known to be mediated by multivalent counterions. Most theories treat the…
Confinement can modify the dynamics, the thermodynamics and the structural properties of liquid water, the prototypical anomalous liquid. By considering a general anomalous liquid, suitable for globular proteins, colloids or liquid metals,…
Using the Fundamental-Measure Density Functional Theory, we have studied theoretically the phase behavior of extremely confined mixtures of parallel hard squares in slit geometry. The pore width is chosen such that configurations consisting…