Related papers: Ideal Glasses and Protein Network Dynamics
From understanding the sand on the beach to the foam on your beer, soft sphere simulations have been crucial to the study of the amorphous world around us. However, many of the materials we interact with on a daily basis aren't comprised of…
Dilute magnetic nanoparticle systems exhibit slow dynamics [1] due to a broad distribution of relaxation times that can be traced to a correspondingly broad distribution of particle sizes [1]. However, at higher concentrations interparticle…
This thesis is about the study of complex systems through simple models. Our work evidences the relevance of this kind of modeling in science, which provides us with a better understanding of nature at minimum cost. The fundamentals tools…
Diffusivity, a measure for how rapidly a fluid self-mixes, shows an intimate, but seemingly fragmented, connection to thermodynamics. On one hand, the "configurational" contribution to entropy (related to the number of mechanically-stable…
For nearly a century, introduction of nanoparticles to elastomers has yielded extraordinarily tough nanocomposites that are critical to technologies from actuators to tires. The mechanisms by which this reinforcement occurs have…
We develop a framework for understanding the difference between strong and fragile behavior in the dynamics of glass-forming liquids from the properties of the potential energy landscape. Our approach is based on a master equation…
Prompted by results that showed that a simple protein model, the frustrated G\=o model, appears to exhibit a transition reminiscent of the protein dynamical transition, we examine the validity of this model to describe the low-temperature…
Comments: 6 pages RevTeX, 6 Postscript figures. We review a statistical mechanics treatment of the stability of globular proteins based on a simple model Hamiltonian taking into account protein self interactions and protein-water…
We use molecular dynamics to investigate the glass transition occurring at large volume fraction, phi, and low temperature, T, in assemblies of soft repulsive particles. We find that equilibrium dynamics in the (phi, T) plane obey a form of…
The rheological behavior of soft glassy materials basically results from the interplay between shearing forces and an intrinsic slow dynamics. This competition can be described by a microscopic theory, which can be viewed as a…
We propose a new scheme to parameterize effective potentials that can be used to simulate atomic systems such as oxide glasses. As input data for the optimization, we use the radial distribution functions of the liquid and the vibrational…
Soft living tissues like cartilage can be considered as biphasic materials comprised of a fibrous complex biopolymer network and a viscous background liquid. Here, we show by a combination of experiment and theoretical analysis that both…
A recently published analytical model, describing and predicting elasticity, viscosity, and fragility of metallic melts, is applied for the analysis of about 30 nonmetallic glassy systems, ranging from oxide network glasses to alcohols,…
Ion-conducting glasses and polymer systems show several characteristic peculiarities in their composition-dependent diffusion properties and in their dynamic response. First we give a brief review of the current understanding of the ion…
We introduce a simulation strategy to consistently couple continuum biomembrane dynamics to the motion of discrete biological macromolecules residing within or on the membrane. The methodology is used to study the diffusion of integral…
We show that one may view the self and the distinct part of the van Hove dynamic correlation function of a simple fluid as the one-body density distributions of a binary mixture that evolve in time according to dynamical density functional…
Despite qualitative differences in their underlying physics, both hard and soft glassy materials exhibit almost identical linear rheological behaviors. We show that these nearly universal properties emerge naturally in a…
Viscoelastic materials have the properties both of elasticity and viscosity. In a previous work we investigate glass relaxation in the framework of viscoelasticity. Here we consider the Burgers model, a first but meaningful step in the…
The interrelations between short range structural and elastic aspects in glasses and glass forming liquids pose important and yet unresolved questions. In this paper these relations are analyzed for mono-atomic glasses and stressed liquids…
We identify a link between the glass transition and percolation of mobile regions in configuration space. We find that many hallmarks of glassy dynamics, for example stretched-exponential response functions and a diverging structural…