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The question of how stiff polymers are able to pack into small containers is particularly relevant to the study of DNA packaging in viruses. A reduced version of the problem based on coarse-grained representations of the main components of…
It has long been known that disorder, perturbing the energy landscape of magnetic systems, can introduce glassy dynamics. However, the controlled role of increasing disorder in driving glass formation remains difficult to isolate in…
Stacking two layers of graphene with a relative twist angle gives rise to moir\'e patterns, which can strongly modify electronic behavior and may lead to unconventional superconductivity. A synthetic version of twisted bilayers can be…
We have connected the dynamic fragility, namely the rapidity of the relaxation time increase upon temperature reduction, to the excess entropy and heat capacity of a large number of glass-forming polymers. The connection was obtained in a…
Soft colloids allow to explore high density states well beyond random close packing. An important open question is whether softness controls the dynamics under these dense conditions. While experimental works reported conflicting results,…
Control of physical behaviors of nematic colloids and colloidal crystals has been demonstrated by tuning particle shape, topology, chirality and surface charging. However, the capability of altering physical behaviors of such soft matter…
Phase separation has recently emerged as an important organizational principle in the dense and heterogeneous environment within living cells. Here, we use a synthetic system to show that compressive stresses in a polymer network suppress…
Many native structures of proteins accomodate complex topological motifs such as knots, lassos, and other geometrical entanglements. How proteins can fold quickly even in the presence of such topological obstacles is a debated question in…
Topological properties of quantum systems are one of the most intriguing emerging phenomena in condensed matter physics. A crucial property of topological systems is the symmetry-protected robustness towards local noise. Experiments have…
Motor-proteins are responsible for transport inside cells. Harnessing their activity is key towards developing new nano-technologies, or functional biomaterials. Cytoskeleton-like networks, recently tailored in vitro, result from the…
We study numerically the mechanical stability and elasticity properties of duplex DNA molecules within the frame of a network model incorporating microscopic degrees of freedom related with the arrangement of the base pairs. We pay special…
Active materials with distinctive nonequilibrium properties have diverse materials science applications. Active systems are common in living matter, such as the filament network in the cell that is activated by molecular motors, and in…
Active fluids generate spontaneous, often chaotic mesoscale flows. Harnessing these flows to drive embedded soft materials into structures with controlled length scales and lifetimes is a key challenge at the interface between the fields of…
Tangentially driven active polymers (TDAPs), model systems for motor-driven filaments, have been extensively studied in uniform activity fields. Here, we show that an activity gradient breaks fore-aft symmetry, generating net body forces…
We investigate the copolymerization behavior of a two-component system into quasi-linear self-assemblies under conditions that interspecies binding is favored over identical species binding. The theoretical framework is based on a…
Dynamics of a polymer chain in solution gets significantly affected by the temperature and the frictional forces arising due to solvent viscosity. Here, using an explicit solvent framework for polymer simulation with the liberty to tune the…
Glassy systems are disordered systems characterized by extremely slow dynamics. Examples are supercooled liquids, whose dynamics slow down under cooling. The specific pattern of slowing-down depends on the material considered. This…
Randomly disordered (polydomain) liquid crystalline elastomers align under stress. We study the dynamics of stress relaxation before, during and after the Polydomain-Monodomain transition. The results for different materials show the…
The non-linear response of entangled polymers to shear flow is complicated. Its current understanding is framed mainly as a rheological description in terms of the complex viscosity. However, the full picture requires an assessment of the…
Hydrodynamic interactions as modeled by Multi-Particle Collision Dynamics can dramatically influence the dynamics of fully flexible, ring-shaped polymers in ways not known for any other polymer architecture or topology. We show that steady…