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In polymers melts and supercooled liquids, the glassy dynamics is characterized by the rattling of monomers or particles in the cage formed by their neighbors. Recently, a direct correlation in such systems, described by a universal scaling…
Superresolution microscopy has become a powerful tool to investigate the internal structure of complex colloidal and polymeric systems, such as microgels, at the nanometer scale. The ability to monitor microgels response to temperature…
We investigate the heterogeneous dynamics in a model, where chemical gelation and glass transition interplay, focusing on the dynamical susceptibility. Two independent mechanisms give raise to the correlations, which are manifested in the…
The glass transition is a long-standing unsolved problem in materials science. For polymers, our understanding of glass-formation is particularly poor due to the added complexity of chain connectivity and flexibility; structural relaxation…
Molecular-scale interactions between solvated macromolecules and solid surfaces govern a large number of processes, from biology to engineering. Yet, despite extensive characterization at the macroscopic level, our molecular understanding…
We present a molecular dynamics study of the influence of knot complexity and molecular mass on glass formation upon cooling in knotted ring polymer melts. We find that cooperative motion, rigidity, and glassy dynamics can be tuned over a…
The theory developed in our previous papers is applied in this paper to investigate the dependence of slowing down of dynamics of glass-forming liquids on the attractive and repulsive parts of intermolecular interactions. Through an…
We measure the isothermal rejuvenation of stable glass films of poly(styrene) and poly(methylmethacrylate). We demonstrate that the propagation of the front responsible for the transformation to a supercooled-liquid state can serve as a…
We use computer simulations to study the relaxation dynamics of a model for oil-in-water microemulsion droplets linked with telechelic polymers. This system exhibits both gel and glass phases and we show that the competition between these…
We report the first large scale molecular dynamics simulations of the effect of the photoisomerization of probe molecules on the dynamics of a glassy molecular material. We show that the photoisomerization of the probe molecules induces the…
The mechanical properties of a disordered heterogeneous medium depend, in general, on a complex interplay between multiple length scales. Connecting local interactions to macroscopic observables, such as stiffness or fracture, is thus…
The origin of the dramatic changes in the behavior of liquids as they approach their vitreous state - increases of many orders of magnitude in transport properties and dynamic time scales - is a major unsolved problem in condensed matter.…
A theoretical treatment of deeply supercooled liquids is difficult because their properties emerge from spatial inhomogeneities that are self-induced, transient, and nanoscopic. I use computer simulations to analyse self-induced static and…
The capacity of proteins to interact specifically with one another underlies our conceptual understanding of how living systems function. Systems-level study of specificity in protein-protein interactions is complicated by the fact that the…
Fragility, quantifying the rapidity of variation of relaxation times, is analysed for a series of model glass formers, which differ in the softness of their interparticle interactions. In an attempt to rationalize experimental observations…
In this work we use molecular simulations to examine methods of controlling mechanical properties of polymeric glass materials such as elastic moduli, mechanical heterogeneity as well as their glass transition temperature. We study filled…
The binary hard-sphere mixture is one of the simplest representations of a many-body system with competing time and length scales. This model is relevant to fundamentally understand both the structural and dynamical properties of materials,…
Responsive poly-N-isopropylacrylamide-based microgels are commonly used as model colloids with soft repulsive interactions. It has been shown that the microgel-microgel interaction in solution can be easily adjusted by varying the…
We report an extensive and systematic investigation of the multi-point and multi-time correlation functions to reveal the spatio-temporal structures of dynamic heterogeneities in glass-forming liquids. Molecular dynamics simulations are…
The existence of heterogeneity in the dynamics of supercooled liquids is believed to be one of the hallmarks of the glass transition. Intense research has been carried out in the past to understand the origin of this heterogeneity in…