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- Barrat, Jean-Louis, et al.
(författare)
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Soft matter roadmap
- 2024
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Ingår i: Journal of Physics. - : Institute of Physics Publishing (IOPP). - 2515-7639. ; 7:1
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Soft materials are usually defined as materials made of mesoscopic entities, often self-organised, sensitive to thermal fluctuations and to weak perturbations. Archetypal examples are colloids, polymers, amphiphiles, liquid crystals, foams. The importance of soft materials in everyday commodity products, as well as in technological applications, is enormous, and controlling or improving their properties is the focus of many efforts. From a fundamental perspective, the possibility of manipulating soft material properties, by tuning interactions between constituents and by applying external perturbations, gives rise to an almost unlimited variety in physical properties. Together with the relative ease to observe and characterise them, this renders soft matter systems powerful model systems to investigate statistical physics phenomena, many of them relevant as well to hard condensed matter systems. Understanding the emerging properties from mesoscale constituents still poses enormous challenges, which have stimulated a wealth of new experimental approaches, including the synthesis of new systems with, e.g. tailored self-assembling properties, or novel experimental techniques in imaging, scattering or rheology. Theoretical and numerical methods, and coarse-grained models, have become central to predict physical properties of soft materials, while computational approaches that also use machine learning tools are playing a progressively major role in many investigations. This Roadmap intends to give a broad overview of recent and possible future activities in the field of soft materials, with experts covering various developments and challenges in material synthesis and characterisation, instrumental, simulation and theoretical methods as well as general concepts.
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| 2. |
- Cardinaux, Frederic, et al.
(författare)
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Cluster-Driven Dynamical Arrest in Concentrated Lysozyme Solutions
- 2011
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Ingår i: The Journal of Physical Chemistry Part B. - : American Chemical Society (ACS). - 1520-5207 .- 1520-6106. ; 115:22, s. 7227-7237
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We present a detailed experimental and numerical study of the structural and dynamical properties of salt-free lysozyme solutions. In particular, by combining small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) data with neutron spin echo (NSE) and rheology experiments, we are able to identify that an arrest transition takes place at intermediate densities, driven by the slowing down of the cluster motion. Using an effective pair potential among proteins, based on the combination of short-range attraction and long-range repulsion, we account remarkably well for the peculiar volume fraction dependence of the effective structure factor measured by SAXS. We show that a transition from a monomer to a cluster-dominated fluid happens at volume fractions larger than phi greater than or similar to 0.05 where the close agreement between NSE measurements and Brownian dynamics simulations confirms the transient nature of the clusters. Clusters even stay transient above the geometric percolation found in simulation at phi > 0.15, though NSE reveals a cluster lifetime that becomes increasingly large and indicates a divergence of the diffusivity at phi greater than or similar to 0.26. Macroscopic measurements of the viscosity confirm this transition where the long-lived-nature of the clusters is at the origin of the simultaneous dynamical arrest at all length scales.
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| 3. |
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| 4. |
- Wikfeldt, Kjartan Thor, 1981-
(författare)
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Structure, Dynamics and Thermodynamics of Liquid Water : Insights from Molecular Simulations
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Water is a complex liquid with many unusual properties. Our understanding of its physical, chemical and biological properties is greatly advanced after a century of dedicated research but there are still many unresolved questions. If answered, they could have important long-term consequences for practical applications ranging from drug design to water purification. This thesis presents results on the structure, dynamics and thermodynamics of liquid water. The focus is on theoretical simulations applied to interpret experimental data from mainly x-ray and neutron scattering and spectroscopy techniques. The structural sensitivity of x-ray and neutron diffraction is investigated using reverse Monte Carlo simulations and information on the pair-correlation functions of water is derived. A new method for structure modeling of computationally demanding data sets is presented and used to resolve an inconsistency between experimental extended x-ray absorption fine-structure and diffraction data regarding oxygen-oxygen pair-correlations. Small-angle x-ray scattering data are modeled using large-scale classical molecular dynamics simulations, and the observed enhanced scattering at supercooled temperatures is connected to the presence of a Widom line emanating from a liquid-liquid critical point in the deeply supercooled high pressure regime. An investigation of inherent structures reveals an underlying structural bimodality in the simulations connected to disordered high-density and ordered low-density molecules, providing a clearer interpretation of experimental small-angle scattering data. Dynamical anomalies in supercooled water observed in inelastic neutron scattering experiments, manifested by low-frequency collective excitations resembling a boson peak, are investigated and found to be connected to the thermodynamically defined Widom line. Finally, x-ray absorption spectra are calculated for simulated water structures using density functional theory. An approximation of intra-molecular zero-point vibrational effects is found to significantly improve the relative spectral intensities but a structural investigation indicates that the classical simulations underestimate the amount of broken hydrogen bonds.
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