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The buckling instabilities of core-shell systems, comprising an interior elastic sphere, attached to an exterior shell, have been proposed to underlie myriad biological morphologies. To fully discuss such systems, however, it is important…
This research paper comprehensively explores the effects of molecular weight and chain architecture on the interfacial and thermodynamic properties of cyclic and linear polymer blends. Utilizing the Kremer-Grest bead-spring model, the study…
Cytoskeletal gels are prototyped to reproduce the mechanical contraction of the cytoskeleton in-vitro. They are composed of a polymer network (backbone), swollen by the presence of a liquid solvent, and active molecules (molecular motors,…
We present a novel, self-consistent and robust theoretical model to investigate elastic interactions between topological defects in liquid crystal shells. Accounting for the non-concentric nature of the shell in a simple manner, we are able…
The minimal energy variations of a directed polymer with tilted columnar disorder in two dimensions are shown numerically to obey a multiscaling at short distances which crosses over to global simple scaling at large distances. The scenario…
Mixtures of polymers of varying topologies and stiffnesses display complex emergent rheological properties that often cannot be predicted from their single-component counterparts. For example, entangled blends of ring and linear polymers…
It is common to study polymer physics through the use of idealized single-chain models, and the most popular of these is the freely jointed chain model. In certain thermodynamic ensembles, statistical mechanical treatment of this model is…
A key assumption of polymer physics is that the random chains polymers extend in flow. Recent experimental evidence has shown that polymer chains compress in Couette flow in a manner counter to expectation. Here, scaling arguments developed…
Dielectric relaxation spectra of block polymers containing sequential type-A dipoles are considered. Spectra of a specific set of block copolymers can be combined to isolate the dynamic cross-correlation between the motions of two distinct…
In a nematic gel, the appearance of nematic order is accompanied by a spontaneous elongation of the gel parallel to the nematic director. If such a gel is made chiral, it has a tendency to form a cholesteric helical texture, in which local…
The stretchability of polymeric materials is critical to many applications such as stretchable electronics and soft robotics, yet the stretchability of conventional cross-linked linear polymers is limited by the entanglements between…
We present a theory for the low-frequency, long-wavelength dynamics of soft smectic-C elastomers with locked-in smectic layers. Our theory, which goes beyond pure hydrodynamics, predicts a dynamic soft elasticity of these elastomers and…
We study the thermodynamic properties of a semiflexible polymer confined inside strips of widths L<=9 defined on a square lattice. The polymer is modeled as a self-avoiding walk and a short range interaction between the monomers and the…
The freely jointed chain is often applied to model the thermodynamics of single polymer chains, but the traditional formulation of the model lacks internal energy changes due to bond stretching. For this reason, the extensible freely…
Using video-microscopy imaging we demonstrate the existence of a short-ranged equilibrium attraction between heavy silica colloids diffusing on soft surfaces of cross-linked polymer gels. The inter-colloid potential can be tuned by changing…
We derive an expression of the core traction contribution to the dislocation elastic energy within linear anisotropic elasticity theory using the sextic formalism. With this contribution, the elastic energy is a state variable consistent…
We investigated the viscoelastic properties of colloid-polymer mixtures at intermediate colloid volume fraction and varying polymer concentrations, thereby tuning the attractive interactions. Within the examined range of polymer…
We model polydomain liquid-crystal elastomers by extending the neo-classical soft and semi-soft free energies used successfully to describe monodomain samples. We show that there is a significant difference between polydomains cross-linked…
The interplay of topological constraints, excluded volume interactions, persistence length and dynamical entanglement length in solutions and melts of linear chains and ring polymers is investigated by means of kinetic Monte Carlo…
Some recent results on the rotational dynamics of polymers are reviewed and extended. We focus here on the relaxation of a polymer, either flexible or semiflexible, initially wrapped around a rigid rod. We also study the steady polymer…