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Nano-scale confinement of polymer in cone-shaped geometries occurs in many experimental situations. A flexible polymer confined in a cone-shaped nano-channel is studied theoretically and using molecular dynamics simulations. Distribution of…
The non-equilibrium structural and dynamical properties of semiflexible polymers confined to two dimensions are investigated by molecular dynamics simulations. Three different scenarios are considered: The force-extension relation of…
We theoretically investigate the kinetics of the folding transition of a single semiflexible polymer. In the folding transition, the growth rate decrease with an increase in the number of monomers in a collapsed domain, suggesting that the…
Spherical confinement can act either stabilizing or destabilizing on the collapsed state of a semi-flexible polymer. General free-energy arguments suggest that the order of the unconstrained collapse transition is the distinguishing factor:…
The most efficient way to pack equally sized spheres isotropically in 3D is known as the random close packed state, which provides a starting point for many approximations in physics and engineering. However, the particle size distribution…
Microbial flagellates typically inhabit complex suspensions of polymeric material which can impact the swimming speed of motile microbes, filter-feeding of sessile cells, and the generation of biofilms. There is currently a need to better…
The effects of a driven fast-oscillating spinneret on the bending instability of electrified jets, leading to the formation of spiral structures in electrospinning experiments with charged polymers, are explored by means of extensive…
After the initial fast spiral-in phase experienced by a common-envelope binary, the system may enter a slow, self-regulated phase, possibly lasting 100s of years, in which all the energy released by orbital decay can be efficiently…
The dynamics of sedimenting particles under gravity are surprisingly complex due to the presence of effective long-ranged forces. When the particles are polar with a well-defined symmetry axis and non-uniform density, recent theoretical…
We develop a model to describe the properties of random assemblies of polydisperse hard spheres. We show that the key features to describe the system are (i) the dependence between the free volume of a sphere and the various coordination…
The transport of polymers with folded configurations across membrane pores is investigated theoretically by analyzing simple discrete stochastic models. The translocation dynamics is viewed as a sequence of two events: motion of the folded…
We employ a multiscale approach to model the translocation of biopolymers through nanometer size pores. Our computational scheme combines microscopic Langevin molecular dynamics (MD) with a mesoscopic lattice Boltzmann (LB) method for the…
Experiments using nanofluidic devices have proven effective in characterizing the physical properties of polymers confined to small cavities. Two recent studies using such methods examined the organization and dynamics of two DNA molecules…
We simulate the dynamics of polydisperse hard spheres at high packing fractions, $\phi$, with an experimentally-realistic particle size distribution (PSD) and other commonly-used PSDs such as gaussian or top hat. We find that the mode of…
Both natural and artificial small-scale swimmers may often self-propel in environments subject to complex geometrical constraints. While most past theoretical work on low-Reynolds number locomotion addressed idealised geometrical…
The dynamics of dense particle packings near the jamming transition is characterized by correlated particle motion. The growth of dynamical heterogeneities, or strong spatial variations in the motion of the particles constituting the…
Polymers confined to a narrow channel are subject to strong entropic forces that tend to drive the molecules apart. In this study, we use Monte Carlo computer simulations to study the segregation behavior of two flexible hard-sphere…
Dense packings composed of irregular polyhedral particles are investigated by numerical simulations under quasistatic triaxial compression. The Contact Dynamics method is used for this investigation with 40 000 particles. The effect of…
We perform numerical simulations of purely repulsive soft colloidal particles interacting via a generalized elastic potential and constrained to a two-dimensional plane and to the surface of a spherical shell. For the planar case, we…
By means of extensive replica-exchange simulations of generic coarse-grained models for helical polymers, we systematically investigate the structural transitions into all possible helical phases for flexible and semiflexible elastic…