Related papers: Liquid crystal director fluctuations and surface a…
We have studied the nucleation and the physical properties of a -1/2 wedge disclination line near the free surface of a confined nematic liquid crystal. The position of the disclination line has been related to the material parameters…
Surface charge controls many static and dynamic properties of soft matter and micro/nanofluidic systems, but its unambiguous measurement forms a challenge. Standard characterization methods typically probe an effective surface charge, which…
We propose a novel computational strategy to study the glass transition of molecular fluids. Our approach combines the construction of simple yet realistic models with the development of Monte Carlo algorithms to accelerate equilibration…
Anisotropic rod-like particles form liquid crystalline phases with varying degrees of orientational and translational order. When confined geometrically, these phases can give rise to topological defects, which can be selected and…
We address experimentally the problem of how the structure of a surface monolayer determines the visco-elasticity of the interface. Optical microscopy and surface quasi--elastic light scattering have been used to characterize aggregation of…
When a liquid droplet is located above a super-hydrophobic surface, it only barely touches the solid portion of the surface, and therefore slides very easily on it. More generally, super-hydrophobic surfaces have been shown to lead to…
We calculate analytically the proportionality constant in the pressure law of a membrane between parallel walls from the strong-coupling limit of variational perturbation theory up to third order. Extrapolating the zeroth to third…
Ab initio Monte Carlo simulations have been performed to determine the equilibrium properties of liquid lithium and lithium clusters at different temperatures. First-principles density-functional methods were employed to calculate the…
The metastable vapor-liquid coexistence of short-range attractive fluids hinders the formation of crystal nuclei, which in turn makes difficult the progress of the system towards its vapor-solid ground state. In this letter we show that…
Atoms at liquid metal surfaces are known to form layers parallel to the surface. We analyze the two-dimensional arrangement of atoms within such layers at the surface of liquid sodium, using ab initio molecular dynamics (MD) simulations…
Two coarse-grained models for polymer chains in dense glass-forming polymer melts are studied by computer simulation: the bond-fluctuation model on a simple cubic lattice, where a bond-length potential favors long bonds, is treated by…
A new method is presented for mesoscopic simulations of particle dispersions in liquid crystal solvents. It allows efficient first-principle simulations of the dispersions involving many particles with many-body interactions mediated by the…
The lattice gas model for adsorption of alkaline elements on W(112) surface is studied by Monte Carlo simulations. The model includes dipole--dipole interaction as well as long-range indirect interaction. The numerical results show that…
We propose a methodology to measure the mechanical properties of membranes from their fluctuations and apply this to optical microscopy measurements of giant unilamellar vesicles of lipids. We analyze the effect of the projection of thermal…
Using the classical density functional theory of freezing and Monte Carlo computer simulations, we explore the liquid-crystalline phase behavior of hard rectangles on flat and cylindrical manifolds. Moreover, we study the effect of a static…
The density relaxation phenomenon is modeled using both Monte Carlo and dissipative MD simulations to investigate the effects of regular taps applied to a vessel having a planar floor filled with monodisperse spheres. Results suggest the…
Configurations of the molecules on the wall of a vacancy, formed by removing a central and its first and second nearest-neighbor (NN) molecules in solid CO2 with the Pa3 structure, were calculated by the Monte Carlo simulation technique at…
One of the long standing challenges in molecular simulation is the description of interfaces. On the molecular length scale, finite size effects significantly influence the properties of the interface such as its interfacial tension, which…
The rational function approximation method, density functional theory, and NVT Monte Carlo simulation are used to obtain the density profiles of multicomponent hard-sphere mixtures near a planar hard wall. Binary mixtures with a size ratio…
We present an experimental study of the statistical properties of millimeter-size spheres floating on the surface of a turbulent flow. The flow is generated in a layer of liquid metal by an electromagnetic forcing. By using two magnet…