Search results for "Phase Transition"
showing 10 items of 1281 documents
Mixed Phases, Phase Transitions, Stability of Matter
2016
Phase mixtures and phase transitions are two major themes of thermodynamics. A third one, related to the former, is the stability of macroscopic matter around us. Mixed phases can be analyzed and illustrated in a nice geometric way. Phase transitions are dealt with from the point of view of classical thermodynamics as well as in the framework of models of statistical mechanics.
Intramolecular phase separation of copolymer "bottle brushes": No sharp phase transition but a tunable length scale
2006
A lattice model for a symmetrical copolymer "bottle brush" molecule, where two types (A,B) of flexible side chains are grafted with one chain end to a rigid backbone, is studied by a variant of the pruned-enriched Rosenbluth method (PERM), allowing for simultaneous growth of all side chains in the Monte Carlo sampling. Choosing repulsive binary interactions between unlike monomers and varying the solvent quality, it is found that phase separation into an $A$-rich part of the cylindrical molecule and a $B$-rich part can occur only locally. Long range order (in the direction of the backbone) does not occur, and hence the transition from the randomly mixed state of the bottle brush to the phas…
Dynamical phase transitions and their relation to structural and thermodynamic aspects of glass physics.
2020
We review recent developments in structural–dynamical phase transitions in trajectory space based on dynamic facilitation theory. An open question is how the dynamic facilitation perspective on the glass transition may be reconciled with thermodynamic theories that posit collective reorganization accompanied by a growing static length scale and, eventually, a vanishing configurational entropy. In contrast, dynamic facilitation theory invokes a dynamical phase transition between an active phase (close to the normal liquid) and an inactive phase, which is glassy and whose order parameter is either a time-averaged dynamic or structural quantity. In particular, the dynamical phase transition in…
Biophysical Characterization of Polysialic Acid—Membrane Nanosystems
2019
Polysialic acid (polySia) is a long, membrane-bound, polyanionic polymer (with the degree of polymerization, DP, up to 400) of negatively charged sialic acid monomers. Biological roles of polySia are based on its ability to modulate repulsive and attractive interactions, and its ability to modulate membrane surface charge density, pH at the membrane surface, and membrane potentials. PolySia is used in anti-bacterial and anti-cancer therapies, and in neural tissue repair. Hydrophobically-modified polySia chains can form nano-structures (micelles or liposomes) with high stability and low toxicity for drug delivery. The analysis, based on the Goldman-Hodgkin-Katz equation, of transmembrane pot…
Transition to superfluidity in liquid 4He
2012
In this work the transition from normal liquid helium I to superfluid liquid helium II, controlled by temperature and pressure, is studied in the simplified assumption of absence of viscosity. A macroscopic thermodynamical model is presented, which chooses as new independent fields the heat flux q and a phase field function f. For the heat flux a modification of Cattaneo equation is written, while for the function f a time dependent Ginzburg-Landau equation is proposed.
Phase transition and lambda-line in liquid helium
2013
A hydrodynamical model describing the superfluid phase transition of 4He close to $\lambda$-line is presented. In the work, which generalizes a phase field model of lambda transition previously formulated by the same authors, the independent fields are the density, the temperature, the velocity, the heat flux and a scalar function $f$, linked to the modulus of the wave-function $\psi$, solution of the Ginzburg-Landau equation. In this framework, the heat flux is given by a modified Maxwell-Cattaneo equation. The restrictions on the constitutive quantities are obtained from the entropy principle, using the Liu method of Lagrange multipliers. A maximum theorem is proved that allows the model …
Partitioning of Pyrene-Labeled Phospho- and Sphingolipids between Ordered and Disordered Bilayer Domains
2004
AbstractHere we have studied how the length of the pyrene-labeled acyl chain (n) of a phosphatidylcholine, sphingomyelin, or galactosylceramide affects the partitioning of these lipids between 1), gel and fluid domains coexisting in bovine brain sphingomyelin (BB-SM) or BB-SM/spin-labeled phosphatidylcholine (PC) bilayers or 2), between liquid-disordered and liquid-ordered domains in BB-SM/spin-labeled PC/cholesterol bilayers. The partitioning behavior was deduced either from modeling of pyrene excimer/monomer ratio versus temperature plots, or from quenching of the pyrene monomer fluorescence by spin-labeled PC. New methods were developed to model excimer formation and pyrene lipid quenchi…
Mean-field theory for superconductivity in twisted bilayer graphene
2018
Recent experiments show how a bilayer graphene twisted around a certain magic angle becomes superconducting as it is doped into a region with approximate flat bands. We investigate the mean-field $s$-wave superconducting state in such a system and show how the state evolves as the twist angle is tuned, and as a function of the doping level. We argue that part of the experimental findings could well be understood to result from an attractive electron--electron interaction mediated by electron--phonon coupling, but the flat-band nature of the excitation spectrum makes also superconductivity quite unusual. For example, as the flat-band states are highly localized around certain spots in the st…
The influence of phase transitions in phosphatidylethanolamine models on the activity of violaxanthin de-epoxidase
2008
In the present study, the influence of the phospholipid phase state on the activity of the xanthophyll cycle enzyme violaxanthin de-epoxidase (VDE) was analyzed using different phosphatidylethanolamine species as model lipids. By using (31)P NMR spectroscopy, differential scanning calorimetry and temperature dependent enzyme assays, VDE activity could directly be related to the lipid structures the protein is associated with. Our results show that the gel (L beta) to liquid-crystalline (L alpha) phase transition in these single lipid component systems strongly enhances both the solubilization of the xanthophyll cycle pigment violaxanthin in the membrane and the activity of the VDE. This pha…
Design, synthesis and stimuli responsive gelation of novel stigmasterol-amino acid conjugates.
2020
Abstract An efficient synthesis of three novel stigmasterol-amino acid (glycine, l -leucine and l -phenylalanine) conjugates as stimuli responsive gelators is reported. The gelation properties of the prepared compounds were investigated in a variety of organic as well as aqueous solvents. The most striking finding of our investigation was that the hydrochloride salts of the prepared conjugates acted as gelators, whereas the neutral conjugates were either non-gelators or formed only a weak gel in anisole. The hydrochloride salts of stigmasteryl glycinate and l -leucinate form gels in n-alcohols (n = 4–10) and in ethane-1,2-diol, and that of stigmasteryl l -phenylalaninate forms gels in aroma…