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The structure and thermodynamic state of a system changes under the influence of external electric fields. Neutral systems are characterized by their dielectric constant epsilon, while charged ones also by their charge distribution. In this…
By means of Langevin dynamics simulations, we investigate the gel formation of randomly functionalized polymers in solution, with the ability to form both intra- and intermolecular reversible bonds. Under highly dilute conditions, these…
It is difficult to derive the solid--fluid transition from microscopic models. We introduce particle systems whose potentials do not decay with distance and calculate their partition function exactly using a method similar to that for…
Holographic studies of the entanglement entropy of field theories dual to charged and neutral black holes in asymptotically global AdS4 spacetimes are presented. The goal is to elucidate various properties of the quantity that are peculiar…
We use a series of molecular dynamics simulations, and analytical theory, to demonstrate that a system of hard spheres confined to a narrow cylindrical channel exhibits a continuous phase transition from an isotropic fluid at low densities,…
We describe electrophoresis of spherical dielectric particles in a uniformly aligned nematic medium with a negative dielectric anisotropy. A spherical particle that orients the liquid crystal (LC) perpendicularly to its surface moves under…
We provide a derivation of holographic entanglement entropy for spherical entangling surfaces. Our construction relies on conformally mapping the boundary CFT to a hyperbolic geometry and observing that the vacuum state is mapped to a…
The basic models of helix-coil transitions in biomolecules are introduced. These include phenomenological, zipper (Bragg-Zimm) models of polypeptides, loop-entropy (Poland-Scheraga) and Hamiltonian (Peyrard-Bishop) models of homogeneous DNA…
Molecular dynamics simulations have been employed to study the formation of a physical (thermoreversible) gel by amphiphilic A-B-A triblock copolymers in aqueous solution. In order to mimic the structure of hydrogel-forming polypeptides…
Self-Consistent Field Theory is applied to a film of cylindrical-forming block copolymer subject to a surface field which tends to align the cylinders parallel to electrical plates, and to an external electric field tending to align them…
Polymers with both soluble and insoluble blocks typically self-assemble into micelles, aggregates of a finite number of polymers where the soluble blocks shield the insoluble ones from contact with the solvent. Upon increasing…
Soft particles such as microgels and core-shell particles can undergo significant and anisotropic deformations when adsorbed to a liquid interface. This, in turn, leads to a complex phase behavior upon compression. Here we develop a…
Guided by the analogy to the Bose-Einstein condensation of the ideal Bose gas (IBG) we propose a new model for the lambda transition of liquid helium. Deviating from the IBG our model uses phase ordered and localized single-particle…
We present mode-coupling theory (MCT) results for densely packed hard-sphere fluids confined between two parallel walls and compare them quantitatively to computer simulations. The numerical solution of MCT is calculated for the first time…
We introduce an exactly solvable statistical-mechanical model of the hydration of non-polar compounds, based on grouping water molecules in clusters where hydrogen bonds and isotropic interactions occur; interactions between clusters are…
We develop a theory to probe the effect of non-equilibrium fluctuation-induced forces on the size of a polymer confined between two horizontal thermally conductive plates subject to a constant temperature gradient, $\nabla T$. We assume…
Crystals with low latent heat are predicted to melt from an entropically stabilized body-centered cubic symmetry. At this weakly first-order transition, strongly correlated fluctuations are expected to emerge, which could change the nature…
We discuss topological phase transitions in ultra-cold Fermi superfluids induced by interactions and artificial spin orbit fields. We construct the phase diagram for population imbalanced systems at zero and finite temperatures, and analyze…
A small model polypeptide represented in atomic detail is folded using Monte Carlo dynamics. The polypeptide is designed to have a native conformation similar to the central part of the helix-turn-helix protein ROP. Starting from a…
We investigate local phase transitions of the solvent in the neighborhood of a solvophobic polymer chain which is induced by a change of the polymer-solvent repulsion and the solvent pressure in the bulk solution. We describe the polymer in…