Related papers: Colloid-Induced Polymer Compression
A theoretical model is developed for predicting dynamic polymer depletion effects under the influence of fluid flow. The results are established by combining the two-fluid model and the self-consistent field theory. We consider a uniform…
Mixtures of ideal polymers with hard spheres whose diameters are smaller than the radius of gyration of the polymer, exhibit extensive immiscibility. The interfacial tension between demixed phases of these mixtures is estimated, as is the…
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…
Discrete element method simulations of confined bidisperse granular shear flows elucidate the balance between diffusion and segregation that can lead to either mixed or segregated states, depending on confining pressure. Results indicate…
We consider a coarse-grained model in which polymers under good-solvent conditions are represented by soft spheres whose radii, which should be identified with the polymer radii of gyrations, are allowed to fluctuate. The corresponding pair…
We study active agents embedded in bulk or in confinement explicitly considering hydrodynamics and simulating the swimmers via an implementation inspired by the squirmer model. We develop a Dissipative Particle Dynamics scheme for the…
Liquid mixtures composed of colloidal particles and much smaller non-adsorbing linear homopolymers can undergo a gelation transition due to polymer-mediated depletion forces. We now show that the addition of linear polymers to suspensions…
We derive an analytical pair potential of mean force for Brownian molecules in the liquid-state. Our approach accounts for many-particle correlations of crowding particles of the liquid, and for diffusive transport across the spatially…
When injected through a contraction, high molecular weight polymer solutions exhibit a sharp increase of apparent viscosity which originates from stretching polymer chains above a critical extension rate. This chain stretching can also…
Colloidal particles that are confined to an interface such as the air-water interface are an example of a two-dimensional fluid. Such dispersions have been observed to spontaneously form cluster and stripe morphologies in certain systems…
Active polymeric systems exhibit a rich spectrum of non-equilibrium phenomena arising from stochastic forces that explicitly break detailed balance. Despite the rapid growth of experimental and numerical studies, analytical progress remains…
Monte Carlo simulations are used to study the translocation of a polymer into a cavity. Modeling the polymer as a hard-sphere chain with a length up to N=601 monomers, we use a multiple-histogram method to measure the variation of the…
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…
Stable colloidal dispersions with evenly distributed particles are important for many technological applications. Due to Brownian motion colloidal particles have constant collisions with each other which often lead to their aggregation…
Several methods for preparing well equilibrated melts of long chains polymers are studied. We show that the standard method in which one starts with an ensemble of chains with the correct end-to-end distance arranged randomly in the…
We present a Brownian dynamics theory with full hydrodynamics (Stokesian dynamics) for a Gaussian polymer chain embedded in a liquid membrane which is surrounded by bulk solvent and walls. The mobility tensors are derived in Fourier space…
While the dynamics of polymer chains in equilibrium media is well understood by now, the polymer dynamics in active non-equilibrium environments can be very different. Here we study the dynamics of polymers in a viscous medium containing…
Polymer translocation in crowded environments is a ubiquitous phenomenon in biological systems. We studied polymer translocation through a pore in free, one-sided (asymmetric), and two-sided (symmetric) crowded environments. Extensive…
The apparently intractable shape of a fold in a compressed elastic film lying on a fluid substrate is found to have an exact solution. Such systems buckle at a nonzero wavevector set by the bending stiffness of the film and the weight of…
Solutions of semiflexible polymers confined by repulsive planar walls are studied by density functional theory and Molecular Dynamics simulations, to clarify the competition between the chain alignment favored by the wall and the depletion…