Related papers: Enhanced premelting at the ice-rubber interface us…
Thin liquid films on surfaces are part of our everyday life, they serve e.g. as coatings or lubricants. The stability of a thin layer is governed by interfacial forces, described by the effective interface potential, and has been subject of…
The motion of three-phase contact lines is one of the most relevant research topics of micro- and nano-fluidics. According to many hydrodynamic and molecular models, the dynamics of contact lines is assumed overdamped and dominated by…
Premelting plays a key role across physics, chemistry, materials and biology sciences but remains poorly understood at the atomic level due to surface characterization limitations. We report the discovery of a novel amorphous ice layer…
A method of simulating the drying process of a soft matter solution with an implicit solvent model by moving the liquid-vapor interface is applied to various solution films and droplets. For a solution of a polymer and nanoparticles, we…
Polymers are known to wet nanopores with high surface energy through an atomically thin precursor film followed by slower capillary filling. We present here light interference spectroscopy using a nanoporous membrane-based chip that allows…
Particles diffusing near interfaces face anisotropic resistance to motion due to hydrodynamic interactions. While this has been extensively studied near \textit{hard} interfaces since the works of Lorentz and Brenner, our understanding of…
The formation of smart emulsions or foams whose stability can be controlled on-demand by switching external parameters is of great interest for basic research and applications. An emerging group of smart stabilizers are microgels, which are…
Models and observations suggest that ice-particle aggregation at and beyond the snowline dominates the earliest stages of planet-formation, which therefore is subject to many laboratory studies. However, the pressure-temperature gradients…
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 $T_g$…
Predicting the rheological behavior of associative polymers bridging colloidal particles into transient networks is fundamentally challenging because the coupled spatiotemporal scales prevent efficient molecular-fidelity modeling. We…
We report on the frictional properties of thin ($\approx \mu m$) poly(dimethylacrylamide) hydrogel films within contacts with spherical silica probes. In order to focus on the contribution to friction of interfacial dissipation, a dedicated…
Although common in nature, the self-assembly of small molecules at sold-liquid interfaces is difficult to control in artificial systems. The high mobility of dissolved small molecules limits their residence at the interface, typically…
Hydrophobic solid-water interfaces underpin processes in nanofluidics, electrochemistry, and energy technologies. Microscopic insights into these systems are often inferred from our understanding of the air-water interface, which is assumed…
Using molecular dynamics simulations, we investigated an integrated bio-nano interface consisting of a \b{eta}-sheet protein stacked onto graphene. We found that the stacking assembly of the model protein on graphene could be controlled by…
Interface cracking is one of the most prominent failure modes in fibre reinforced polymer (FRP) composites. Recent trends in high-tech applications of FRP composites exploit the limits of the load bearing capacity, generally encompassing…
The tribology of a bubble rubbing on a solid surface is studied via interferometry. A unique experimental setup is designed for monitoring the thickness profiles of a wetting film, intercalated between the bubble and hydrophilic glass…
In equilibrium the interface potential that describes the interaction between two AB interfaces in a binary blend of A and B homopolymers is attractive at all distances, resulting in coarsening of the blend morphology even in the absence of…
Freezing of water droplets placed on the bare and superhydrophobic surfaces of polymer wedges are studied both experimentally and computationally. Two-dimensional numerical calculations of the transient temperature field in a chilled…
Premelting describes the confluence of phenomena that are responsible for the stable existence of the liquid phase of matter in the solid region of its bulk phase diagram. Here we develop a theoretical description of the premelting of water…
Soft lubricated contacts exhibit complex interfacial behaviours governed by the coupled effects of multiscale surface roughness and non-linear fluid-solid interactions. Accurately capturing this interplay across thin-film flows is…