Related papers: Polymer Topology and the Depletion Interaction
We report molecular dynamics simulation results on the equilibrium properties of polymer thin films adsorbed onto flat and curved substrates. We first systematically determine the contact angle of polymer droplets on flat substrates as a…
We use the method of dimensional reduction to show that a branching polymer with excluded volume interaction confined between two flat plates has, in the thermodynamic limit, a confinement free energy and density profile that is the same as…
Polymers are an effective test-bed for studying topological constraints in condensed matter due to a wide array of synthetically-available chain topologies. When linear and ring polymers are blended together, emergent rheological properties…
By means of sophisticated Monte Carlo methods, we investigate the conformational phase diagram of a simple model for flexible polymers with explicit thickness. The thickness constraint, which is introduced geometrically via the global…
We study the structure and interfacial properties of model athermal mixtures of colloids and excluded volume polymers. The colloid particles are modeled as hard spheres whereas the polymer coils are modeled as chains formed from…
The effective quasistatic conductivity of composite polymeric electrolytes is studied in terms of a hard-core--penetrable-layer model. Used to incorporate the interface phenomena (such as amorphization of the polymer matrix around filler…
We study the dynamics and conformation of polymers composed by active monomers. By means of Brownian dynamics simulations we show that when the direction of the self-propulsion of each monomer is aligned with the backbone, the polymer…
We present a novel mechanism for resolving the mechanical rigidity of nanoscopic circular polymers that flow in a complex environment. The emergence of a regime of negative differential mobility induced by topological interactions between…
Based upon kinetic Monte Carlo simulations of crystallization in a simple polymer model we present a new picture of the mechanism by which the thickness of lamellar polymer crystals is constrained to a value close to the minimum…
The molecular dynamics simulations were used to obtain the radius of gyration of real ring polymer chains with different topological structures consisting of 360 monomers. We focus on the entropic force which is exerted by a dilute solution…
Unconcatenated, unknotted polymer rings in the melt are subject to strong interactions with neighboring chains due to the presence of topological constraints. We study this by computer simulation using the bond-fluctuation algorithm for…
Topological constraints (TCs) between polymers determine the behaviour of complex fluids such as creams, oils and plastics. Most of the polymer solutions used every day life employ linear chains; their behaviour is accurately captured by…
Macromolecular solubility in solvent mixtures often exhibit striking and paradoxical nature. For example, when two well miscible poor solvents for a given polymer are mixed together, the same polymer may swell within intermediate mixing…
The relationship between polymer topology and bulk rheology remains a key question in soft matter physics. Architecture-specific constraints (or threadings) are thought to control the dynamics of ring polymers in ring-linear blends, which…
The surface tension of interacting polymers in a good solvent is calculated theoretically and by computer simulations for a planar wall geometry and for the insertion of a single colloidal hard-sphere. This is achieved for the planar wall…
The slip phenomena in thin polymer films confined by either flat or periodically corrugated surfaces are investigated by molecular dynamics and continuum simulations. For atomically flat surfaces and weak wall-fluid interactions, the shear…
We propose that several mechanisms contribute to friction in a polymer melt adsorbed at a structured surface. The first one is the well known disentanglement of bulk polymer chains from the surface layer. However, if the surface is ideal at…
Polymer entanglements lead to complicated topological constraints and interactions between neighbouring chains in a dense solution or melt. Entanglements can be treated in a mean field approach, within the famous reptation model, since they…
Two ring polymers close to each other in space may be either in a segregated phase if there is a strong repulsion between monomers in the polymers, or intermingle in a mixed phase if there is a strong attractive force between the monomers.…
We consider a ternary mixture of hard colloidal spheres, ideal polymer spheres, and rigid vanishingly thin needles, which model stretched polymers or colloidal rods. For this model we develop a geometry-based density functional theory,…