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Colloid or nanoparticle mobility under confinement is of central importance to a wide range of physical and biological processes. Here, we introduce a minimal model of particles in a hydrodynamic continuum to examine how particle shape and…
Obtaining general relations between macroscopic properties of random assemblies, such as density, and the microscopic properties of their constituent particles, such as shape, is a foundational challenge in the study of amorphous materials.…
Macromolecular crowding can influence polymer shapes, which is important for understanding the thermodynamic stability of polymer solutions and the structure and function of biopolymers (proteins, RNA, DNA) under confinement. We explore the…
Combining experimental procedures and theoretical modeling, we studied patterns, shapes, and growth of a special type of SuperAbsorbent Polymers (SAP). At the initial stage, embed in water, we have a polygonal pattern over a spherical form,…
Velocity relaxation of a spherically symmetric polymer, immersed in a viscous incompressible fluid, and after a sudden small impulse or a sudden twist from a state of rest, is studied on the basis of the linearized Navier-Stokes equations…
We investigate the ejection dynamics of a ring polymer out of a cylindrical nanochannel using both theoretical analysis and three dimensional Langevin dynamics simulations. The ejection dynamics for ring polymers shows two regimes like for…
We study the conformations of a semiflexible chain, confined in nano-scaled spherical cavities, under two distinct processes of confinement. Radial contraction and packaging are employed as two confining procedures. The former method is…
Spherical particles confined to a sphere surface cannot pack densely into a hexagonal lattice without defects. In this study, we use hard particle Monte Carlo simulations to determine the effects of continuously deformable shape anisotropy…
Bacteriophages, phages for short, are viruses of bacteria. The majority of phages contain a double-stranded DNA genome packaged in a capsid at a density of ~500 mg/ml. This high density requires substantial compression of the normal B form…
We study the outflow of soft particles through quasi-two-dimensional hoppers with both experiments and simulations. The experiments utilize spheres made with soft hydrogel, silicon rubber and glass. The hopper chamber has an adjustable exit…
Confinement is a versatile and well-established tool to study the properties of polymers either to understand biological processes or to develop new nano-biomaterials. We investigate the conformations of a semiflexible polymer ring in weak…
The formation of quasi-spherical cages from protein building blocks is a remarkable self-assembly process in many natural systems, where a small number of elementary building blocks are assembled to build a highly symmetric icosahedral…
We investigate the conformations of a semiflexible polymer confined to a square box. Results of Monte Carlo simulations show the existence of a shape transition when the persistence length of the polymer becomes comparable to the dimensions…
Dense packing of particles has provided important models to study the structure of matter in various systems such as liquid, glassy and crystalline phase, etc. The simplest sphere packing models are able to represent and capture salient…
We study the dynamics of polymer chains in a bath of self-propelled particles (SPP) by extensive Langevin dynamics simulations in a two dimensional system. Specifically, we analyse the polymer looping properties versus the SPP activity and…
Polymer translocation through a nanopore in a membrane investigated theoretically. Recent experiments on voltage-driven DNA and RNA translocations through a nanopore indicate that the size and geometry of the pore are important factors in…
The rotational diffusive motion of a self-propelled, attractive spherical colloid immersed in a solution of self-avoiding polymers is studied by mesoscale hydrodynamic simulations. A drastic enhancement of the rotational diffusion by more…
We theoretically study the self-propulsion of a thin (slender) colloid driven by asymmetric chemical reactions on its surface at vanishing Reynolds number. Using the method of matched asymptotic expansions, we obtain the colloid…
Fundamental understanding of the effect of microscopic parameters on the dynamics of probe particles in different complex environments has wide implications. Examples include diffusion of proteins in the biological hydrogels, porous media,…
We report the results of Monte Carlo simulations investigating the effect of a spherical confinement within a simple model for a flexible homopolymer. We use the parallel tempering method combined with multi-histogram reweighting analysis…