Related papers: Bridging-induced Aggregation in Neutral Polymers: …
Aggregation of like-charged polymers is widely observed in biological and soft matter systems. In many systems, bundles are formed when a short-range attraction of diverse physical origin like charge-bridging, hydrogen-bonding or…
Active matter systems are able to exhibit emergent non-equilibrium states due to activity-induced effective interactions between the active particles. Here we study the aggregation and dynamical behavior of active rotating particles,…
Gradient-driven diffusion in crowded, multicomponent mixtures is a topic of high interest because of its role in biological processes such as transport in cell membranes. In partially phase-separated solutions, gradient-driven diffusion…
We consider forces acting on objects immersed in, or attached to, long fluctuating polymers. The confinement of the polymer by the obstacles results in polymer-mediated forces that can be repulsive (due to loss of entropy) or attractive (if…
We investigate aggregation and fragmentation dynamics of tracers and inertial aggregates in random flows leading to steady state size distributions. Our objective is to elucidate the impact of changes in aggregation rates, due to…
The crazing behavior of polymer nanocomposites formed by blending polymer grafted nanoparticles with an entangled polymer melt is studied by molecular dynamics simulations. We focus on the three key differences in the crazing behavior of a…
Ring polymers are an intriguing class of polymers with unique physical properties, and understanding their behavior is important for developing accurate theoretical models. In this study, we investigate the effect of chain stiffness and…
In this paper we consider a continuous-time anisotropic swarm model with an attraction/repulsion function and study its aggregation properties. It is shown that the swarm members will aggregate and eventually form a cohesive cluster of…
Microtubules are an essential physical building block of cellular systems. They are organized using specific crosslinkers, motors, and influencers of nucleation and growth. With the addition of anti-parallel crosslinkers, microtubule…
Recent experimental results suggest that the E. coli chromosome feels a self-attracting interaction of osmotic origin, and is condensed in foci by bridging interactions. Motivated by these findings, we explore a generic modeling framework…
We investigate the role played by the bidispersity of polymer chains on the local structure and the potential of mean force (PMF) between silica nanoparticles (NPs) in a polystyrene melt. We use the hybrid particle-field molecular dynamics…
We study the motility-induced aggregation of active Brownian particles (ABPs) on a porous, circular wall. We observe that the morphology of aggregated dense-phase on a static wall depends on the wall porosity, particle motility, and the…
The structure of polymer networks, defined by chain lengths and connectivity patterns, fundamentally influences their bulk properties. While existing polymer network models connect chain properties to emergent network behavior, they are…
We investigate bridging and aggregation of two colloidal particles in a near-critical binary mixture when the fluid far from the particles is outside the coexistence (CX) curve and is rich in the component disfavored by the colloid…
Mixtures of polymers of varying topologies and stiffnesses display complex emergent rheological properties that often cannot be predicted from their single-component counterparts. For example, entangled blends of ring and linear polymers…
Adding a non-adsorbing polymer to passive colloids induces an attraction between the particles via the `depletion' mechanism. High enough polymer concentrations lead to phase separation. We combine experiments, theory and simulations to…
Motivated by the fine compositional control observed in membraneless droplet organelles in cells, we investigate how a sharp binding-unbinding transition can occur between multivalent client molecules and receptors embedded in a porous…
We study the aggregation transition of a finite theta-polymer system in dependence on the bending stiffness $\kappa$ with the help of parallel multicanonical simulations. In order to distinguish amorphous aggregates from polymer bundles we…
Depletion forces and macromolecular crowding govern the structure and function of biopolymers in biological cells and the properties of polymer nanocomposite materials. To isolate and analyze the influence of polymer shape fluctuations and…
The increasing number of mass events involving large crowds calls for a better understanding of the dynamics of dense crowds. Inquiring into the possibility of a mechanical description of these dynamics, we experimentally study the crossing…