Related papers: Tuning polymer architecture for quasicrystal self-…
Semiflexible polymers in poor solvents exhibit a rich variety of collapsed morphologies, including globules, toroids, and rodlike bundles, arising from the competition between attractive interactions and chain stiffness. Computer…
The interplay of nematic order and phase separation in solutions of semiflexible polymers in solvents of variable quality is investigated by density functional theory (DFT) and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. We studied coarse-grained…
Recent theoretical studies have predicted a new clustering mechanism for soft matter particles that interact via a certain kind of purely repulsive, bounded potentials. At sufficiently high densities, clusters of overlapping particles are…
Advancements in the synthesis of faceted nanoparticles and colloids have spurred interest in the phase behavior of polyhedral shapes. Regular tetrahedra have attracted particular attention because they prefer local symmetries that are…
The results obtained from molecular dynamics simulations of the friction at an interface between polymer melts and weakly attractive crystalline surfaces are reported. We consider a coarse-grained bead-spring model of linear chains with…
Many soft-matter and biophysical systems are composed of monomers which reversibly assemble into rod-like aggregates. The aggregates can then order into liquid-crystal phases if the density is high enough, and liquid-crystal ordering…
The ability to tune the microstructures formed by block copolymers using accessible physical approaches provides control for practical material applications. A common strategy involves the addition of homopolymers, which can induce…
Understanding multibody interactions between colloidal particles out of equilibrium has a profound impact on dynamical processes such as colloidal self assembly. However, traditional colloidal interactions are effectively quasi-static on…
Polymeric materials that couple deformation and electrostatics have the potential for use in soft sensors and actuators with potential applications ranging from robotic, biomedical, energy, aerospace and automotive technologies. In contrast…
Investigating thermodynamic properties of liquid-solid transitions of flexible homopolymers with elastic bonds by means of multicanonical Monte Carlo simulations, we find crystalline conformations that resemble ground-state structures of…
Understanding how soft particles can fill the space is still an open question. Structures far from classical FCC or BCC phases are now commonly experimentally observed in many different systems. Models based on pair interaction between soft…
In the last two years we have witnessed the exciting experimental discovery of soft matter with nontrivial quasiperiodic long-range order - a new form of matter termed a soft quasicrystal. Two groups have independently discovered such order…
Recent advances in Generalized Ensemble simulations and microcanonical analysis allowed the investigation of structural transitions in polymer models over a broad range of local bending and torsion strengths. It is reasonable to argue that…
Herein, we describe new methods to produce colloidal particle chains of three stiffness regimes that can be observed on a single-particle level, that is, on the level of the monomers that make up the chain; the chains can even be observed…
Icosahedral quasicrystals spontaneously form from the melt in simulations of Al--Cu--Fe alloys. We model the interatomic interactions using oscillating pair potentials tuned to the specific alloy system based on a database of density…
We experimentally study the condensed phases of repelling core-softened spheres in two dimensions. The dipolar pair repulsion between superparamagnetic spheres trapped in a thin cell is induced by a transverse magnetic field and softened by…
We calculate the two, three, four, and five-body (state independent) effective potentials between the centers of mass (CM) of self avoiding walk polymers by Monte-Carlo simulations. For full overlap, these coarse-grained n-body interactions…
Electronic states in quasiperiodic crystals generally preclude a Bloch description, rendering them simultaneously fascinating and enigmatic. Owing to their complexity and relative scarcity, quasiperiodic crystals are underexplored relative…
Confinement is a versatile and well-established tool to study the properties of polymers either to understand biological processes or to develop new nano-biomaterials. We investigate the conformations of a semiflexible polymer ring in weak…
We present an extensive numerical study of the critical behavior of dimer models in three dimensions, focusing on the phase transition between Coulomb and crystalline columnar phases. The case of attractive interactions between parallel…