Related papers: Spinodal decomposition in polymer mixtures via sur…
I develop a kinetic mechanism to explain chain folding in polymer crystallization which is based on the competition between the formation of stems, which is due to frequent occupations of trans states along the chains in the supercooled…
We study dewetting of thin polymer films with built-in topographical fluctuations produced by rubbing the film surface with a rayon cloth. By varying the density of imposed surface defects, we unambiguously distinguish spinodal dewetting,…
We investigate the growth of a film of some element B on a substrate made of another substrance A in a model of molecular beam epitaxy. A vertical exchange mechanism allows the A-atoms to stay on the growing surface with a certain…
We use state-of-the-art molecular dynamics simulations to study hydrodynamic effects on aging during kinetics of phase separation in a fluid mixture. The domain growth law shows a crossover from a diffusive regime to a viscous hydrodynamic…
Inspired by recent experiments on chromosomal dynamics, we introduce an exactly solvable model for the interaction between a flexible polymer and a set of motor-like enzymes. The enzymes can bind and unbind to specific sites of the polymer…
By extending the Sanchez-Lacombe lattice-fluid model for mixtures to the case of polymer blends containing solid fillers, we calculate the excess thermodynamic quantities arising from the presence of fillers. These results are then used to…
We report diffusion coeffcients of micron-scale liquid domains in giant unilamellar vesicles of phospholipids and cholesterol. The trajectory of each domain is tracked, and the mean square displacement grows linearly in time as expected for…
Dynamics of spreading of small droplets on surfaces has been studied by the molecular dynamics method. Simulations have been performed for mixtures of solvent and dimer, and solvent and tetramer droplets. For solvent particles and dimers,…
The dynamic structure factor of semiflexible polymers in solution is derived from the wormlike chain model. Special attention is paid to the rigid constraint of an inextensible contour and to the hydrodynamic interactions. For the cases of…
We present simulation results and an explanatory theory on how antagonistic salts affect the spinodal decomposition of binary fluid mixtures. We find that spinodal decomposition is arrested and complex structures form only when…
We consider the stochastic evolution of a 1+1-dimensional interface (or polymer) in presence of a substrate. This stochastic process is a dynamical version of the homogeneous pinning model. We start from a configuration far from…
Soft glassy materials often consist of deformable objects. Here, we use a two-dimensional assembly of semi-flexible ring polymers as a model system to investigate how polydispersity in particle stiffness or size influences the onset of…
Protein molecules often self-assemble by means of non-covalent physical bonds to form extended filaments, such as amyloids, F-actin, intermediate filaments, and many others. The kinetics of filament growth is limited by the disassembly…
The dynamics of polypropylene glycol, both neat and attached to silica nanoparticles, were investigated using elastic neutron backscattering and dielectric spectroscopy. The mean square displacement measured by the former is suppressed by…
We propose an exactly solvable self-consistent kinetic model of polymerization-induced phase separation (PIPS) via spinodal decomposition. Using modified Cahn-Hilliard and Glotzer-Coniglio theories for early and late stages of spinodal…
Phase separation within polymer networks plays a central role in shaping the structure and mechanics of both synthetic materials and living cells, including the formation of biomolecular condensates within cytoskeletal networks. Previous…
Following up a recent paper on grafted sliding polymer layers (Macromolecules 2005, 38, 1434-1441), we investigated the influence of the sliding degree of freedom on the self-assembly of sliding polymeric surfactants that can be obtained by…
Mixtures of granular media often exhibit size segregation along the axis of a partially-filled, horizontal, rotating cylinder. Previous experiments have observed axial bands of segregation that grow from concentration fluctuations and merge…
We investigate the swelling and shrinking of L_beta lamellar gel phases composed of surfactant and fatty alcohol after contact with aqueous poly(ethylene-glycol) solutions. The height change $\Delta h(t)$ is diffusion-like with a swelling…
Using mathematical model for intercalation dynamics in phase-separating materials proposed in (Singh, G. K.; Ceder, G.; Bazant, M. Z. Electrochimica Acta 2008, 53, 7599) and developed further in (Burch, D.; Bazant, M. Z. Nano Letters 2009,…