Related papers: Polymer solutions: from hard monomers to soft poly…
We develop a new analytic approach for the study of lattice heteropolymers, and apply it to copolymers with correlated Markovian sequences. According to our analysis, heteropolymers present three different dense phases depending upon the…
An analytical description of polymer melts and their mixtures as liquids of interacting soft colloidal particles is obtained from liquid-state theory. The derived center-of-mass pair correlation functions with no adjustable parameters…
We present results from molecular dynamics simulations of a spherically confined neutral polymer in the presence of crowding agents, studying polymer shapes and conformations as a function of the confining potential, solvent quality and the…
Smart polymers are a modern class of polymeric materials that often exhibit unpredictable behavior in mixtures of solvents. One such phenomenon is co-non-solvency. Co-non-solvency occurs when two (perfectly) miscible and competing good…
We make use of the previously developed formalism for a monomer ensemble and include angular dependence of the segments of the polymer chains thus described. In particular we show how to deal with stiffness when the polymer chain is…
We study the effect of a gradient of solvent quality on the coil-globule transition for a polymer in a narrow pore. A simple self-attracting self-avoiding walk model of a polymer in solution shows that the variation in the strength of…
Polymer behavior in mixed solvents often exhibits intriguing phenomena, such as cosolvency, where a polymer that collapses in two individually poor solvents becomes soluble in their mixture. In this study, we employ a combination of…
We consider a diffuse interface model describing a ternary system constituted by a conductive diblock copolymer and a homopolymer acting as solvent. The resulting dynamics is modeled by two Cahn--Hilliard--Oono equations for the copolymer…
As a model of soft confinement for polymers, we investigated equilibrium shapes of a flexible vesicle that contains a phase-separating polymer solution. To simulate such a system, we combined the phase field theory (PFT) for the vesicle and…
The behavior of mesoscopic particles dissolved in a dilute solution of long, flexible, and nonadsorbing polymer chains is studied by field-theoretic methods. For spherical and cylindrical particles the solvation free energy for immersing a…
The growing interest in the dynamical properties of colloidal suspensions, both in equilibrium and under an external drive such as shear or pressure flow, requires the development of accurate methods to correctly include hydrodynamic…
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 present simulations on charged polymers in poor solvent. First we investigate in detail the dilute concentration range with and without imposed extension constraints. The resulting necklace polymer conformations are analyzed in detail.…
A linear copolymer made of two reciprocally attracting N-monomer blocks collapses to a compact phase through a novel transition, whose exponents are determined with extensive MC simulations in two and three dimensions. In the former case,…
We present using simple scaling arguments and one step replica symmetry breaking a theory for the localization of semiflexible polymers in a quenched random environment. In contrast to completely flexible polymers, localization of…
We consider a ternary mixture of hard colloidal spheres, ideal polymer spheres, and rigid vanishingly thin needles, which model stretched polymers or colloidal rods. For this model we develop a geometry-based density functional theory,…
Many materials containing colloids or polymers are polydisperse: They comprise particles with properties (such as particle diameter, charge, or polymer chain length) that depend continuously on one or several parameters. This review…
Recent advances in Generalized Ensemble simulations and microcanonical analysis allowed the investigation of structural transitions in polymer models over a broad range of local bending and torsion strengths. It is reasonable to argue that…
In this paper we study a model describing a copolymer in a micro-emulsion. The copolymer consists of a random concatenation of hydrophobic and hydrophilic monomers, the micro-emulsion consists of large blocks of oil and water arranged in a…
We propose a two fluid theory to model a dilute polymer solution assuming that it consists of two phases, polymer and solvent, with two distinct macroscopic velocities. The solvent phase velocity is governed by the macroscopic Navier-Stokes…