Related papers: Nanoconfinement Effects on Intermolecular Forces O…
Fundamental understanding of macroscopic properties of polymer nanocomposites (PNCs) remains difficult due to the complex interplay of microscopic dynamics and structure, namely interfacial layer relaxations and three-dimensional…
Dewetting of thin polystyrene films deposited onto silicone wafers at temperatures close to the glass transition exhibits unusual dynamics and front morphologies. Here, we present a new theoretical approach of these phenomena taking into…
The surface stability of two interacting (for example, by van der Waals forces) incompressible thin films, one bonded to a substrate and the other to a contactor, is studied extending the work of Shenoy and Sharma, Physical Review Letters…
Adhesion requires molecular contact, and natural adhesives employ mechanical gradients to achieve complete (conformal) contact to maximize adhesion. Intuitively, one expects that the higher the modulus of the top layer, the lower will be…
We investigate the influence of side-wall wetting on the linear stability of falling liquid films confined in the spanwise direction. A biglobal stability framework is developed, capturing inertia, viscosity, gravity, capillarity, and…
Interlayer coupling in two-dimensional (2D) layered nanomaterials can provide us novel strategies to evoke their superior properties, such as the exotic flat bands and unconventional superconductivity of twisted layers, the formation of…
Confined geometries offer useful and experimentally amenable mechanical testing arrangements in which to study the molecular and micro-structural processes which govern plastic yield in stress environments dominated by hydrostatic pressure…
In cellular environment, confinement and macromulecular crowding play an important role on thermal stability and folding kinetics of a protein. We have resorted to a generalized version of the Wako-Saito-Munoz-Eaton model for protein…
Wetting behaviour of surfaces is believed to be affected by van der Waals (vdW) forces, however, there is no clear demonstration of this. With the isolation of two-dimensional vdW layered materials it is possible to test this hypothesis. In…
Carefully designed nanostructures can inspire new type of optomechanical interactions and allow surpassing limitations set by classical diffractive optical elements. Apart from strong near-field localization, nanostructured environment…
This paper reviews recent Monte Carlo simulation studies of the glassy behavior in thin polymer films. The simulations employ a version of the bond-fluctuation lattice model, in which the glass transition is driven by the competition…
It is suggested that low dimensionality can improve the thermoelectric (TE) power factor of a device, offering an enhancement of the ZT figure of merit. In this work the atomistic sp3d5s*-spin-orbit-coupled tight-binding model and the…
Confinement breaks the translational symmetry of materials. Such symmetry breaking can be used to obtain configurations that are not otherwise accessible in the bulk. Here, we explore the effect of substrate-liquid interactions on the…
In the cell, protein complexes form relying on specific interactions between their monomers. Excluded volume effects due to molecular crowding would lead to correlations between molecules even without specific interactions. What is the…
The miniaturization of electronic devices has led to the prominence, in technological applications, of semiconductor thin films that are only a few nanometers thick. In spite of intense research, the thickness-dependent resistivity or…
In this work, molecular dynamics simulations are performed to estimate the equilibrium pressure of liquid confined in nanopores. The simulations show that the pressure is highly sensitive to the pore size and can significantly change from…
Changes in the dynamics of supported polymer films in comparison to bulk materials involve a complex convolution of effects, such as substrate interactions, roughness and compliance, in addition to film thickness. We consider molecular…
The interface between two immiscible polymers, polystyrene (PS) and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), was studied by neutron reflectivity and dewetting by using free PS chains and PDMS brushes. Unexpectedly, we found that the PS chains diffuse…
Using extensive Monte Carlo (MC) and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, we investigate how spatial confinement affects molecular organization within thin films of the nematic twist-bend ($\mathrm{N_{TB}}$) phase. Our simulations show that…
We perform molecular dynamics simulations of an idealized polymer melt surrounding a nanoscopic filler particle to probe the effects of a filler on the local melt structure and dynamics. We show that the glass transition temperature $T_g$…