Related papers: Instabilities of Charged Polyampholytes
We report an experimental study on the dynamics of a thin film of polymer solution coating a vertical fiber. The liquid film has first a constant thickness and then undergoes the Rayleigh-Plateau instability which leads to the formation of…
The critical incompatibility of polymers with different compositions scales inversely with their length. For instance, a mixture of A and B homopolymers of length $N$ segregates at $\chi_{AB}^{cr} = 2/N$. But what if the difference between…
The number of configurations of a polymer is reduced in the presence of a barrier or an obstacle. The resulting loss of entropy adds a repulsive component to other forces generated by interaction potentials. When the obstructions are scale…
We study the energy structure and the transfer of an extra electron or hole along periodic polymers made of $N$ monomers, with a repetition unit made of $P$ monomers, using a Tight-Binding wire model, where a site is a monomer (e.g., in…
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 present a detailed study of the static and dynamic behavior of long semiflexible polymer chains in a melt. Starting from previously obtained fully equilibrated high molecular weight polymer melts [{\it Zhang et al.} ACS Macro Lett. 3,…
We demonstrate that nascent polymer crystals (i.e., nuclei) are anisotropic entities, with neither spherical nor cylindrical geometry, in contrast to previous assumptions. In fact, cylindrical, spherical, and other high symmetry geometries…
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…
Rigid particles pack into structures, such as sand dunes on the beach, whose overall stability is determined by the average number of contacts between particles. However, when packing spatially extended objects with flexible shapes,…
Conformation-dependent design of polymer sequences can be considered as a tool to control macromolecular self-assembly. We consider the monomer unit sequences created via the modification of polymers in a homogeneous melt in accordance with…
We investigate, using numerical simulations and analytical arguments, a simple one dimensional model for the swelling or the collapse of a closed polymer chain of size N, representing the dynamical evolution of a polymer in a \Theta-solvent…
This chapter deals with charged polymers (polyelectrolytes) in solution and at surfaces. The behavior of polyelectrolytes is markedly different from that of neutral polymers. In bulk solutions, i.e. disregarding the surface effect, there…
We use complete enumeration and Monte Carlo techniques to study self--avoiding walks with random nearest--neighbor interactions described by $v_0q_iq_j$, where $q_i=\pm1$ is a quenched sequence of ``charges'' on the chain. For equal numbers…
We study a quenched charged-polymer model, introduced by Garel and Orland in 1988, that reproduces the folding/unfolding transition of biopolymers. We prove that, below the critical inverse temperature, the polymer is delocalized in the…
We consider a system of clusters made of elementary building blocks, monomers, and evolving via collisions between diffusing monomers and immobile composite clusters. In our model, the cluster-monomer collision can lead to the attachment of…
An off-lattice Monte Carlo algorithm for solutions of equilibrium polymers (EP) is proposed. At low and moderate densities this is shown to reproduce faithfully the (static) properties found recently for flexible linear EP using a lattice…
As analogues of compact objects, solitons have attracted significant attention. We reveal that cylindrical Q-strings exhibit a dynamical instability to perturbations with wavelengths exceeding a threshold $\lambda>\lambda_{c}$. This…
The association between polyelectrolytes (PEs) of the same size but opposite charge is systematically studied in terms of the potential of mean force (PMF) along their center-of-mass reaction coordinate via coarse-grained, implicit-solvent,…
Most, but not all, liquid crystals tend to align when subject to shear flow, while most nematic polymeric liquid crystals undergo a tumbling instability, where the director rotate with the flow. The reasons of this instability remain…
A variational framework is developed to examine the equilibrium states of a semi-flexible polymer that is constrained to lie on a fixed surface. As an application the confinement of a closed polymer loop of fixed length $2\pi R$ within a…