Related papers: Dipolar Self-Interactions Drive Polymer Chain Coll…
Biological organisms often have elongated, flexible structures with some degree of chirality in their bodies or movements. In nature, these organisms frequently take advantage of self-encapsulation mechanisms that create folded…
We study the magnetic response due to neutral solitons induced by disorder in polymer materials. We account for interchain interactions, which, if sufficiently strong, result in a bond-ordered phase, in which the neutral solitons are bound…
Constitutive modeling of dielectric elastomers has been of long standing interest in mechanics. Over the last two decades rigorous constitutive models have been developed that couple the electrical response of these polymers with large…
Chain-like macromolecules in solution, whether biological or synthetic, transform from an extended conformation to a compact one when temperature or other system parameters change. This collapse transition is relevant in various phenomena,…
A conceptual difficulty in the Hooke's-law description of ideal Gaussian polymer-chain elasticity is sometimes apparent in analyses of experimental data or in physical models designed to simulate the behavior of biopolymers. The problem,…
In a variety of situations, isolated polymer molecules are found in a vacuum and here we examine their properties. Angular momentum conservation is shown to significantly alter the average size of a chain and its conservation is only broken…
We investigate the kinetics of a polymer collapse due to the formation of irreversible crosslinks between its monomers. Using the contact probability $P(s)$ as a scale-dependent order parameter depending on the chemical distance $s$, our…
We study the problem of adsorption and collapse transition of a linear polymer chain situated in a fractal container represented by a 4-simplex lattice and interacting with a surface adsorbed linear polymer chain. The adsorbed chain…
Using exact enumeration methods and Monte Carlo simulations we study the phase diagram relative to the conformational transitions of a two dimensional diblock copolymer. The polymer is made of two homogeneous strands of monomers of…
Studies of the thermodynamics of complex coacervation of pairs of symmetric, strongly ionizable, oppositely charged polyelectrolyte chains are abundant. To generalize such understanding to asymmetric chain lengths and variable ionizability…
We have used computer simulation to study the collapse of a hydrophobic chain in water. We find that the mechanism of collapse is much like that of a first order phase transition. The evaporation of water in the vicinity of the polymer…
Molecular dynamics simulation methods are used to study the folding of polymer chains into packed cubic states. The polymer model, based on a chain of linked sites moving in the continuum, includes both excluded volume and torsional…
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…
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…
Polarizable particle systems, including charged colloids, polarizable ions, biomolecular assemblies, and soft nanomaterials, can exhibit contact electrostatic interactions that depart strongly from Coulomb behavior when dielectric mismatch…
Critical fluctuations are known to induce a collapse of polymer chains in a mixed solvent upon approaching its liquid-liquid critical point, as originally predicted by Brochard and de Gennes. Recently, we have found that closer to the…
We investigate the dynamics of the collapse of a single copolymer chain, when the solvent quality is suddenly quenched from good to poor. We employ Brownian dynamics simulations of a bead-spring chain model and incorporate fluctuating…
Spherical confinement can act either stabilizing or destabilizing on the collapsed state of a semi-flexible polymer. General free-energy arguments suggest that the order of the unconstrained collapse transition is the distinguishing factor:…
A new quantitative theory for polyelectrolytes in salt free dilute solutions is developed. Depending on the electrostatic interaction strength, polyelectrolytes in solutions can undergo strong stretching (with polyelectrolyte dimension…
Using a free-energy based computational model, we have investigated the response of a system comprising two interacting ferroelectric nanospheres, embedded in a dielectric medium, to a static external electric field. The system response is…