Related papers: Lateral and normal forces between patterned substr…
For like charged colloidal particles two mechanisms of attraction between them survive when the interparticle distance is larger than the Debye screening length. One of them is the conventional van der Waals attraction and the second one is…
Charge fluctuations in nano-circuits with capacitor components are shown to give rise to a novel type of long-ranged interaction, which co-exist with the regular Casimir/van der Waals force. The developed theory distinguishes between…
We study the instantaneous and local energy injection in a turbulent shear flow driven by volume forces. The energy injection can be both positive and negative. Extremal events are related to coherent streaks. The probability distribution…
Van der Waals trap, a quantum fluctuation-induced potential characterized by short-range repulsive and long-range attractive forces, is intrinsically nonlinear. This work unveils the nonlinear effects on Brownian oscillators in the van der…
We perform Brownian dynamics simulations of semiflexible colloidal sheets with hydrodynamic interactions and thermal fluctuations in shear flow. As a function of the ratio of bending rigidity to shear energy (a dimensionless quantity we…
We explore how thermal fluctuations affect the mechanics of thin amorphous spherical shells. In flat membranes with a shear modulus, thermal fluctuations increase the bending rigidity and reduce the in-plane elastic moduli in a…
We report a numerical study addressing the dynamics of compound vesicles confined in a channel under shear flow. The system comprises a smaller vesicle embedded within a larger one and can be used to mimic, for example, leukocytes or…
Critical fluctuations of some order parameter describing a fluid generates long-range forces between boundaries. Here, we discuss fluctuation-induced forces associated to a disordered Landau-Ginzburg model defined in a $d$-dimensional slab…
It has been recently shown that randomly charged surfaces can exhibit long range electrostatic interactions even when they are net neutral. These forces depend on the specific realization of charge disorder and thus exhibit sample to sample…
We predict the existence of lateral drag forces near the flat surface of an absorbing slab of an anisotropic material. The forces originate from the fluctuations of the electromagnetic field, when the anisotropy axis of the material forms a…
We use scaling arguments and coarse grained Monte Carlo simulations to study the fluctuation mediated interactions between a pair of adhesion sites of a bilayer membrane and a supporting surface. We find that the potential of mean force is…
Nematic liquid crystals at rough and fluctuating interfaces are analyzed within the Frank elastic theory and the Landau-de Gennes theory. We study specifically interfaces that locally favor planar anchoring. In the first part we reconsider…
Within the framework of continuum theory, we draw a parallel between ferromagnetic materials and nematic liquid crystals confined on curved surfaces, which are both characterized by local interaction and anchoring potentials. We show that…
We study the statistics of the power flux into a collection of inelastic beads maintained in a fluidized steady-state by external mechanical driving. The power shows large fluctuations, including frequent large negative fluctuations, about…
From microscopic fluid clusters to macroscopic droplets, the structure of fluids is governed by the Van der Waals force, a force that acts between polarizable objects. In this Letter, we derive a general theory that describes the…
Thermal fluctuations strongly modify the large length-scale elastic behavior of crosslinked membranes, giving rise to scale-dependent elastic moduli. While thermal effects in flat membranes are well understood, many natural and artificial…
Shear flow is known to induce huge density fluctuations in otherwise clear and uniform polymer solutions. This effect is rooted in the elasticity of the entangled polymer network, and can span distances over a thousand chains wide. It has…
We calculate the friction force between two semi-infinite solids in relative parallel motion (velocity $V$), and separated by a vacuum gap of width $d$. The friction force result from coupling via a fluctuating electromagnetic field, and…
Nematic liquid crystals confined to geometrically as well as chemically patterned substrate on one end and a flat substrate with strong anchoring on the other is studied using non-Boltzmann Monte Carlo methods. We observe significant…
We study the behavior of the critical Casimir force and its interplay with the van der Waals force acting between two parallel slabs separated at a distance $L$ from each other confining a non-polar simple fluid or a binary liquid mixture.…