Related papers: Comb-like polymers inside nanoscale pores
Exploiting elastic instability in thin films has proven a robust method for creating complex patterns and structures across a wide range of lengthscales. Even the simplest of systems, an elastic membrane with a lattice of pores, under…
We present a method to probe molecular and nanoparticle diffusion within thin, solvated polymer coatings. The device exploits the confinement with well-defined geometry that forms at the interface between a planar and a hemi-spherical…
A new type of metal-dielectric composites has been proposed that is characterised by a resonance-like behaviour of the effective permeability in the infrared and visible spectral ranges. This material can be referred to as optomagnetic…
Inwardly curved polymer brushes are present in cylindrical and spherical micelles or in membranes tubes and vesicles decorated with anchored polymers, and influence their stability. We consider such polymer brushes in good solvent and show…
We study the permeability of quasi two-dimensional porous structures of randomly placed overlapping monodisperse circular and elliptical grains. Measurements in microfluidic devices and lattice Boltzmann simulations demonstrate that the…
The structure of a polystyrene matrix filled with tightly cross-linked polystyrene nanoparticles, forming an athermal nanocomposite system, is investigated by means of a Monte Carlo sampling formalism. The polymer chains are represented as…
Sensing light's polarization and wavefront direction enables surface curvature assessment, material identification, shadow differentiation, and improved image quality in turbid environments. Traditional polarization cameras utilize multiple…
Polymer composite materials require softening to reduce their glass transition temperature and improve processability. To this end, plasticizers, which are small organic molecules, are added to the polymer matrix. The miscibility of these…
Optical frequency combs have revolutionised time and frequency metrology [1, 2]. The advent of microresonator-based frequency combs ('microcombs' [3-5]) is set to lead to the miniaturisation of devices that are ideally suited to a wide…
The permeability of certain polymer membranes with impenetrable nanoinclusions increases with the particle volume fraction (Merkel et al., Science, 296, 2002). This intriguing observation contradicts even qualitative expectations based on…
DNA translocation through nanopores is one of the most promising strategies for the next-generation sequencing technologies. Most part of experimental and numerical works has focused on polymer translocation biased by electrophoresis, where…
We investigate polymer partitioning from polymer mixtures into nanometer size cavities by formulating an equation of state for a binary polymer mixture assuming that only one (smaller) of the two polymer components can penetrate the cavity.…
The structural features of polystyrene brushes grafted on spherical silica nanoparticles immersed in polystyrene are investigated by means of a Monte Carlo methodology based on polymer mean field theory. The nanoparticle radii (either 8 nm…
In this thesis various plasmonic materials, such as hyperbolic metamaterial nanohole arrays and Au-coated free standing nanoassembly supporting nanopores, are investigated with the aim to perform optical sensing of DNA molecules with…
Biochars are an exciting class of environmental materials with a wide range of applications, including carbon storage and sequestration, soil enhancement, and pollution remediation. However, the limited knowledge of their molecular…
We study the diffusion of a linear polymer in the presence of permeable membranes without excluded volume interactions, using scaling theory and Monte Carlo simulations. We find that the average time it takes for a chain with polymerization…
We have developed a suite of novel infrared-blocking filters made by embedding scattering particles in a polymer aerogel substrate. Our developments allow us to tune the spectral performance of the filters based on both the composition of…
We show how to coarse grain polymers in a good solvent as single particles, interacting with density-independent or density-dependent interactions. These interactions can be between the centres of mass, the mid-points or end-points of the…
We examine nanoparticles (NPs) forming polyhedral sections of the ideal cubic lattice, simple (sc), body centered (bcc), and face centered (fcc) cubic, which are confined by facets characterized by densest and second densest {h k l}…
The resolution-line edge roughness-sensitivity tradeoff has motivated exploration of potential improvements using defined sequence polymers and polymer-bound photoacid generators and quenchers. In this study we characterize the internal…