Related papers: Polymer Shape Anisotropy and the Depletion Interac…
We consider anisotropic colloidal particles immersed in a solution of long, flexible, and nonadsorbing polymers. For the dumbbell shapes of recently synthesized particles consisting of two intersecting spheres and for lens-shaped particles…
The depletion interactions between two colloidal plates or between two colloidal spheres, induced by interacting polymers in a good solvent, are calculated theoretically and by computer simulations. A simple analytical theory is shown to be…
The behavior of mesoscopic particles dissolved in a dilute solution of long, flexible, and nonadsorbing polymer chains is studied by field-theoretic methods. For spherical and cylindrical particles the solvation free energy for immersing a…
Using a theoretical model we show that ideal ring polymers are stronger depletants than ideal linear polymers of equal radii of gyration, but not of equal hydrodynamic radii. The difference in the depletion-induced force profile is largely…
Depletion-induced interactions between colloids in colloid-polymer mixtures depend in range and strength on size, shape, and concentration of depletants. Crowding by colloids in turn affects shapes of polymer coils, such as biopolymers in…
We determine the depletion-induced phase-behavior of hard sphere colloids and interacting polymers by large-scale Monte Carlo simulations using very accurate coarse-graining techniques. A comparison with standard Asakura-Oosawa model…
The effect of the anisotropy on the elastoplastic response of two dimensional packed samples of polygons is investigated here, using molecular dynamics simulation. We show a correlation between fabric coefficients, characterizing the…
We discuss structural correlations in mixtures of free polymer and colloidal particles based on a microscopic, 2-component liquid state integral equation theory. Whereas in the case of polymers much smaller than the spherical particles the…
Depletion forces and macromolecular crowding govern the structure and function of biopolymers in biological cells and the properties of polymer nanocomposite materials. To isolate and analyze the influence of polymer shape fluctuations and…
Numerical simulations on a 2-dimensional model system showed that voids are induced primarily due to shape anisotropy in binary mixtures of interacting disks. The results of such a simple model account for the key features seen in a variety…
The possibility to induce demixing in a colloidal mixture by adding small polymers, or other equivalent depletant agents, is theoretically investigated. By use of Mean Field Theory, suitably generalized to deal with short range effective…
We study the effects of two kinds of interactions in tube-like polymers and demonstrate that they result in the formation of secondary motifs. The first has an entropic origin and is a measure of the effective space available to the…
We propose a 2-d computational model-system comprising a mixture of spheres and the objects of some other shapes, interacting via the Lennard-Jones potential. We propose a reliable and efficient numerical algorithm to obtain void…
Entangled polymers are deformed by a strong shear flow. The shape of the polymer, called the form factor, is measured by small angle neutron scattering. However, the real-space molecular structure is not directly available from the…
Entropic forces in colloidal suspensions and in polymer-colloid systems are of long-standing and continuing interest. Experiments show how entropic forces can be used to control the self-assembly of colloidal particles. Significant advances…
We consider binary mixtures of soft repulsive spherical particles and calculate the depletion interaction between two big spheres mediated by the fluid of small spheres, using different theoretical and simulation methods. The validity of…
We discuss the computation of the third virial coefficient in polymer systems, focusing on an additional contribution absent in the case of monoatomic fluids. We determine the interpenetration ratio and several quantities that involve the…
We consider the problem of an ideal polymer confined in a droplet. When the droplet radius is smaller than the (unconfined) polymer radius of gyration, the polymer entropy will depend on the droplet shape. We compute the resulting surface…
We derive and introduce anisotropic effective pair potentials to coarse-grain solutions of semiflexible rings polymers of various lengths. The system has been recently investigated by means of full monomer-resolved computer simulations,…
In this paper we study the shape characteristics of star-like polymers in various solvent quality using a mesoscopic level of modeling. The dissipative particle dynamics simulations are performed for the homogeneous and four different…