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We have developed a theory of polymer entanglement using an extended Cahn-Hilliard functional, with two extra terms. One is a nonlocal attractive term, operating over mesoscales, which is interpreted as giving rise to entanglement, and the…
Despite their considerable practical and biological applications, the link between molecular properties, assembly conditions and self-organized structure in confined polymer solutions remains elusive. Here, we explore the lyotropic nematic…
Topological states can be used to control the mechanical properties of a material along an edge or around a localized defect. The surface rigidity of elastic networks is characterized by a bulk topological invariant called the polarization;…
Confined thin structures are ubiquitous in nature. Spatial and length constraints have led to a number of novel packing strategies at both the micro-scale, as when DNA packages inside a capsid, and the macro-scale, seen in plant root…
Random packings of stiff rods are self-supporting mechanical structures stabilized by long range interactions induced by contacts. To understand the geometrical and topological complexity of the packings, we first deploy X-ray computerized…
Entangled granular systems exhibit mechanical rigidity and resistance to deformation, reminiscent of cohesive materials, due to their reduced degrees of freedom and contact friction. A quantitative understanding of how classical granular…
We use recently developed primitive path analysis (PPA) methods to study the effect of equilibration on entanglement density in model polymeric systems. Values of N_e for two commonly used equilibration methods differ by a factor of two or…
In this paper we examine the relative knotting probabilities in a lattice model of ring polymers confined in a cavity. The model is of a lattice knot of size $n$ in the cubic lattice, confined to a cube of side-length $L$ and with volume…
The density of extended topological defects created during symmetry-breaking phase transitions depends on the ratio between the correlation length in the symmetric phase near $T_c$ and the winding length of the defects as determined by the…
We study the influence of some quenched disorder in the sequence of monomers on the entropic elasticity of long polymeric chains. Starting from the Kratky-Porod model, we show numerically that some randomness in the favoured angles between…
The interaction of polymers with small-scale velocity gradients can trigger a coil-stretch transition in the polymers. We analyze this transition within a direct numerical simulation of shear turbulence with an Oldroyd-B model for the…
Chromosomes are crumpled polymer chains further folded into a sequence of stochastic loops via loop extrusion. While extrusion has been verified experimentally, the particular means by which the extruding complexes bind DNA polymer remains…
We investigate the diagonal entropy for ground states of the extended Kitaev chains with extensive pairing and hopping terms. The systems contain rich topological phases equivalently represented by topological invariant winding numbers and…
We study the thermodynamic properties of a semiflexible polymer confined inside strips of widths L<=9 defined on a square lattice. The polymer is modeled as a self-avoiding walk and a short range interaction between the monomers and the…
Polymer entanglements lead to complicated topological constraints and interactions between neighbouring chains in a dense solution or melt. Entanglements can be treated in a mean field approach, within the famous reptation model, since they…
In this paper we study a system of entangled chains that bear reversible cross-links in a melt state. The cross-links are tethered uniformly on the backbone of each chain. A slip-link type model for the system is presented and solved for…
We perform extensive molecular dynamics simulations of dense liquids composed of bidisperse dimer- and ellipse-shaped particles in 2D that interact via repulsive contact forces. We measure the structural relaxation times obtained from the…
We consider a model mixture of hard colloidal spheres and non-adsorbing polymer chains in a theta solvent. The polymer component is modelled as a polydisperse mixture of effective spheres, mutually noninteracting but excluded from the…
The transport coefficients of dense polymeric fluids are approximately calculated from the microscopic intermolecular forces. The following finite molecular weight effects are discussed within the Polymer-Mode-Coupling theory (PMC) and…
Entanglement entropy provides a powerful characterization of two-dimensional gapped topological phases of quantum matter, intimately tied to their description by topological quantum field theories (TQFTs). Fracton topological orders are…