Search results for "Condensed Matter - Soft Condensed Matter"
showing 10 items of 364 documents
The Structure of Cholesterol in Lipid Rafts
2014
Rafts, or functional domains, are transient nano- or mesoscopic structures in the plasma membrane and are thought to be essential for many cellular processes such as signal transduction, adhesion, trafficking and lipid/protein sorting. Observations of these membrane heterogeneities have proven challenging, as they are thought to be both small and short-lived. With a combination of coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations and neutron diffraction using deuterium labeled cholesterol molecules we observe raft-like structures and determine the ordering of the cholesterol molecules in binary cholesterol-containing lipid membranes. From coarse-grained computer simulations, heterogenous membra…
Bimodal drop size distributions during the early stages of shear induced coalescence
2005
Drop sizes and drop size distributions were determined by means of an optical shear cell in combination with an optical microscope for the systems polyisobutylene/poly(dimethylsiloxane) (I) and poly(dimethyl-co-methylphenylsiloxane)/poly(dimethylsiloxane) (II) at low concentrations of the suspended phases and at different constant shear rates ranging from 10 to 0.5 s-1 . After pre-shearing the two-phase mixtures (I: 50 s-1; II: 100 s-1) for the purpose of producing small drop radii, the shear rate was abruptly reduced to the preselected value and coalescence was studied as a function of time. In all cases one approaches dead end drop radii, i.e. breakup is absent. The drop size distribution…
Spontaneous Spatiotemporal Ordering of Shape Oscillations Enhances Cell Migration
2019
The migration of cells is relevant for processes such as morphogenesis, wound healing, and invasion of cancer cells. In order to move, single cells deform cyclically. However, it is not understood how these shape oscillations influence collective properties. Here we demonstrate, using numerical simulations, that the interplay of directed motion, shape oscillations, and excluded volume enables cells to locally "synchronize" their motion and thus enhance collective migration. Our model captures elongation and contraction of crawling ameboid cells controlled by an internal clock with a fixed period, mimicking the internal cycle of biological cells. We show that shape oscillations are crucial f…
Flow properties and hydrodynamic interactions of rigid spherical microswimmers.
2017
We analyze a minimal model for a rigid spherical microswimmer and explore the consequences of its extended surface on the interplay between its self-propulsion and flow properties. The model is the first order representation of microswimmers, such as bacteria and algae, with rigid bodies and flexible propelling appendages. The flow field of such a microswimmer at finite distances significantly differs from that of a point-force (Stokeslet) dipole. For a suspension of microswimmers, we derive the grand mobility matrix that connects the motion of an individual swimmer to the active and passive forces and torques acting on all the swimmers. Our investigation of the mobility tensors reveals tha…
Escape transition of a polymer chain from a nanotube: How to avoid spurious results by use of the force-biased pruned-enriched Rosenbluth algorithm
2008
A polymer chain containing $N$ monomers confined in a finite cylindrical tube of diameter $D$ grafted at a distance $L$ from the open end of the tube may undergo a rather abrupt transition, where part of the chain escapes from the tube to form a "crown-like" coil outside of the tube. When this problem is studied by Monte Carlo simulation of self-avoiding walks on the simple cubic lattice applying a cylindrical confinement and using the standard pruned-enriched Rosenbluth method (PERM), one obtains spurious results, however: with increasing chain length the transition gets weaker and weaker, due to insufficient sampling of the "escaped" states, as a detailed analysis shows. In order to solve…
Complex Formation between Polyelectrolytes and Oppositely Charged Oligoelectrolytes
2016
We study the complex formation between one long polyanion chain and many short oligocation chains by computer simulations. We employ a coarse-grained bead-spring model for the polyelectrolyte chains, and model explicitly the small salt ions. We systematically vary the concentration and the length of the oligocation, and examine how the oligocations affects the chain conformation, the static structure factor, the radial and axial distribution of various charged species, and the number of bound ions in the complex. At low oligocation concentration, the polyanion has an extended structure. Upon increasing the oligocation concentration, the polyanion chain collapses and forms a compact globule,…
Molecular dynamics simulations in hybrid particle-continuum schemes: Pitfalls and caveats
2017
Heterogeneous multiscale methods (HMM) combine molecular accuracy of particle-based simulations with the computational efficiency of continuum descriptions to model flow in soft matter liquids. In these schemes, molecular simulations typically pose a computational bottleneck, which we investigate in detail in this study. We find that it is preferable to simulate many small systems as opposed to a few large systems, and that a choice of a simple isokinetic thermostat is typically sufficient while thermostats such as Lowe-Andersen allow for simulations at elevated viscosity. We discuss suitable choices for time steps and finite-size effects which arise in the limit of very small simulation bo…
The Observation of Formation and Annihilation of Solitons and Standing Strain Wave Superstructures in a Two-Dimensional Colloidal Crystal
2008
Confining a colloidal crystal within a long narrow channel produced by two parallel walls can be used to impose a meso-scale superstructure of a predominantly mechanical elastic character [Chui et al., EPL 2008, 83, 58004]. When the crystal is compressed in the direction perpendicular to the walls, we obtain a structural transition when the number of rows of particles parallel to the walls decreases by one. All the particles of this vanishing row are distributed throughout the crystal. If the confining walls are structured (say with a corrugation along the length of the walls), then these extra particles are distributed neither uniformly nor randomly; rather, defect structures are created a…
Fluctuating Interfaces in Liquid Crystals
2008
We review and compare recent work on the properties of fluctuating interfaces between nematic and isotropic liquid-crystalline phases. Molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo simulations have been carried out for systems of ellipsoids and hard rods with aspect ratio 15:1, and the fluctuation spectrum of interface positions (the capillary wave spectrum) has been analyzed. In addition, the capillary wave spectrum has been calculated analytically within the Landau-de Gennes theory. The theory predicts that the interfacial fluctuations can be described in terms of a wave vector dependent interfacial tension, which is anisotropic at small wavelengths (stiff director regime) and becomes isotropic at l…
EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION ON TENSILE STRENGTH OF JACQUARD KNITTED FABRICS
2015
An objective approach to select the best fabric for technical and home textiles consists in mechanical properties evaluation. The goal of this study is to analyze the behavior of knitted fabrics undergoing stretch stress. In this respect, three types of 2 colors Rib structure (backstripes jacquard, twillback jacquard and double-layered 3x3 rib fabric) have been presented and tested for tensile strength and elongation on three directions. First, the elasticity and the behavior of knitted Rib fabrics were described The fabrics were knitted using 100% PAN yarns with Nm 1/15x2 on a E5 CMS 330 Stoll V-bed knitting machine, and have been tested using INSTROM 5587 Tensile Testing Machine in respec…