Related papers: Contact Forces in Microgel Suspensions

Soft pair potentials predict a reentrant liquid phase for high concentrations, a behavior not observed experimentally. Here, very soft microgels confined at an oil-water interface are used as a model system of particles interacting via a…

We study the free energy landscapes of a pair of submicron spherical particles floating at the surface of a sessile droplet. The particles are subjected to radial external forces resulting in a deformation of the droplet shape relative to…

How frictional effects emerge at the microscopic level in particulate materials remains a challenging question, particularly in systems subject to thermal fluctuations due to the transient nature of interparticle contacts. Here, we directly…

We present an extension of the multiparticle collision dynamics method for flows with complex interfaces, including supramolecular near-contact interactions mimicking the effect of surfactants. The new method is demonstrated for the case of…

A uniform solidification front undergoes non-trivial deformations when encountering an insoluble dispersed particle in a melt. For solid particles, the overall deformation characteristics are primarily dictated by heat transfer between the…

Soft interfaces can mediate interactions between particles bound to them. The force transmitted through the surface geometry on a particle may be expressed as a closed line integral of the surface stress tensor around that particle. This…

Understanding contact line dynamics on superhydrophobic surfaces with microscopic structures is essential for designing materials with reduced drag, anti-icing, self-cleaning, and anti-fouling properties. Using numerical simulations, we…

The influence of finite system size on the free energy of a spherical particle floating at the surface of a sessile droplet is studied both analytically and numerically. In the special case that the contact angle at the substrate equals…

Microgels are soft colloidal particles that, when dispersed in a solvent, swell and deswell in response to changes in environmental conditions, such as temperature, concentration, and $p$H. Using Monte Carlo simulation, we model bulk…

Simple models for spherical particles with a soft shell have been shown to self-assemble into numerous crystal phases and even quasicrystals. However, most of these models rely on a simple pairwise interaction, which is usually a valid…

Various microfluidic systems, such as chemical and biological lab-on-a-chip devices, involve motion of multiple droplets within an immersing fluid in shallow micro-channels. Modeling the dynamics of such systems requires calculation of the…

We propose a theoretical framework to predict the three-dimensional shapes of optically deformed micron-sized emulsion droplets with ultra-low interfacial tension. The resulting shape and size of the droplet arises out of a balance between…

We simulate the collision of atomic clusters with a weakly attractive surface using molecular dynamics in a regime between soft-landing and fragmentation, where the cluster undergoes large deformation but remains intact. As a function of…

A fluid droplet in general deforms, if subject to active driving, such as a finite slip velocity or active tractions on its interface. We show that these deformations and their dynamics can be computed analytically in a perturbation theory…

Within a general theoretical framework we study the effective, deformation-induced interaction between two colloidal particles trapped at a fluid interface in the regime of small deformations. In many studies, this interaction has been…

Charged colloidal particles trapped at an air--water interface are well known to form an ordered crystal, stabilized by a long ranged repulsion, the details of this repulsion remain something of a mystery, but all experiments performed to…

Control of the swelling, chemical functionalization, and adhesivity of hydrogels are finding new applications in a wide range of material systems. We investigate experimentally the effect of adsorbed particles on hydrogels on the depinning…

A weakly deformable droplet impinging on a rigid surface rebounds if the surface is intrinsically hydrophobic or if the gas film trapped underneath the droplet is able to keep the interfaces from touching. A simple, physically motivated…

We study the interaction of small hydrophobic particles on the surface of an ultra-soft elastic gel, in which a small amount of elasticity of the medium balances the weights of the particles. The excess energy of the surface of the deformed…

Computer simulations and theory are used to systematically investigate how the effective force between two big colloidal spheres in a sea of small spheres depends on the basic (big-small and small-small) interactions. The latter are modeled…