Soft MatterPub Date : 2025-02-28DOI: 10.1039/d4sm01544d
Manja Annette Behrens, Alexandra Franzén, Sara Carlert, Urban Skantze, Lennart Lindfors, Ulf Olsson
{"title":"On the Ostwald ripening of crystalline and amorphous nanoparticles.","authors":"Manja Annette Behrens, Alexandra Franzén, Sara Carlert, Urban Skantze, Lennart Lindfors, Ulf Olsson","doi":"10.1039/d4sm01544d","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1039/d4sm01544d","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Ostwald ripening of crystalline and amorphous nanoparticle dispersions of a model organic compound are compared. While amorphous nanoparticles show a rapid ripening on the timescale of minutes, the crystalline nanoparticles do not ripen within the timescale of weeks. A metastable zone for crystal growth, presumably involving a free energy barrier, is identified, and we propose that this explains the absence of Ostwald ripening in the nanocrystal dispersion. As Ostwald ripening is a process typically occurring near equilibrium, even a small barrier may prevent ripening.</p>","PeriodicalId":103,"journal":{"name":"Soft Matter","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143522128","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"化学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Soft MatterPub Date : 2025-02-27DOI: 10.1039/d4sm01309c
Fumitake Kato, Hiroshi Koibuchi, Elie Bretin, Camille Carvalho, Roland Denis, Simon Masnou, Madoka Nakayama, Sohei Tasaki, Tetsuya Uchimoto
{"title":"Turing patterns on polymerized membranes: coarse-grained lattice modelling with an internal degree of freedom for polymer direction.","authors":"Fumitake Kato, Hiroshi Koibuchi, Elie Bretin, Camille Carvalho, Roland Denis, Simon Masnou, Madoka Nakayama, Sohei Tasaki, Tetsuya Uchimoto","doi":"10.1039/d4sm01309c","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1039/d4sm01309c","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We numerically study Turing patterns (TPs) on two-dimensional surfaces with a square boundary in <b>R</b><sup>3</sup> using a surface model for polymerized membranes. The variables used to describe the membranes correspond to two distinct degrees of freedom: an internal degree of freedom for the polymer directions in addition to the positional degree of freedom. This generalised surface model enables us to identify non-trivial interference between the TP system and the membranes. To this end, we employ a hybrid numerical technique, utilising Monte Carlo updates for membrane configurations and discrete time iterations for the FitzHugh-Nagumo type Turing equation. The simulation results clearly show that anisotropies in the mechanical deformation properties, particularly the easy axes associated with the stretching and bending of the membranes, determine the direction of the TPs to be perpendicular or parallel to the easy axes. Additionally, by calculating the dependence of the maximum entropy on the internal degree of freedom, we can obtain information on the relaxation with respect to the polymer structure. This crucial information serves to remind us that non-equilibrium configurations can be captured within the canonical Monte Carlo simulations.</p>","PeriodicalId":103,"journal":{"name":"Soft Matter","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143514288","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"化学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Soft MatterPub Date : 2025-02-26DOI: 10.1039/d4sm01454e
Jiayi Liu, Dmitrii Sychev, Nadiia Davydiuk, Mahmoud Al-Hussein, Andreas Fery, Quinn A Besford
{"title":"Hybrid phytoglycogen-dopamine nanoparticles as biodegradable underwater adhesives.","authors":"Jiayi Liu, Dmitrii Sychev, Nadiia Davydiuk, Mahmoud Al-Hussein, Andreas Fery, Quinn A Besford","doi":"10.1039/d4sm01454e","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1039/d4sm01454e","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Developing adhesive materials that can selectively degrade into non-toxic by-products is a key challenge in materials science, particularly for short-term implantable devices and tissue regeneration treatments. Herein, we leverage biodegradable phytoglycogen (PG) nanoparticles (highly branched glucose polysaccharide nanoparticles) as scaffolds for coupling adhesive dopamine motifs to be used as biodegradable underwater adhesives. Phytoglycogen-dopamine (PG-dopa) hybrid nanoparticles could be synthesised in an aqueous solvent, to which the products retained a similar size and particle morphology to the initial PG nanoparticles. The PG-dopa nanoparticles could readily be assembled into dense monolayers on silica substrates through a simple dip-coating procedure. Colloidal probe atomic force microscopy was used to characterise underwater adhesiveness, where it was found that the films produced strain energy release rates approaching 8 mJ m<sup>-2</sup> between hard silica materials. Importantly, the PG-dopa films retained the original biodegradability towards glucosidase enzymes, which can degrade the adhesives in fluids containing these enzymes over time (<i>e.g.</i>, 45 U mL<sup>-1</sup> of α-amylase solution degraded the majority of the adhesive films in 30 min). Given the inherent biocompatibility of glycogen materials, we anticipate these adhesives having application in short-term implantable devices.</p>","PeriodicalId":103,"journal":{"name":"Soft Matter","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143497728","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"化学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Soft MatterPub Date : 2025-02-26DOI: 10.1039/d4sm00980k
Botong Li, Lanxin Mo, Vivek Narsimhan, Ganesan Narsimhan, John M Frostad
{"title":"A refined mechanistic model for swelling kinetics of starch granules.","authors":"Botong Li, Lanxin Mo, Vivek Narsimhan, Ganesan Narsimhan, John M Frostad","doi":"10.1039/d4sm00980k","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1039/d4sm00980k","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper investigates the gelatinization of individual starch granules using numerical simulations, validated against experimental microscopy data from a ParCS apparatus. We show that the dynamics of starch-granule swelling can be captured by a diffusion equation for mass transfer of water into the granule, with the equilibrium water content captured by a Flory-Rehner theory of a cross-linked network in which the fraction of cross-linked chains is made to vary as an empirical function of temperature. Having the cross-link density vary with temperature is vital to capture the swelling behavior at large and small swelling extents (<i>i.e.</i>, close to and far away from the gelatinization temperature). The theory produces excellent agreement with both equilibrium swelling data and dynamic swelling data for red bean starch. Further, we show that the model is able to reproduce a previous experimental finding that swelling data from different granules from red bean, chickpea, green lentil, and yellow pea starches can be collapsed onto a universal curve with only two empirical parameters. The simulations are then used to predict the relationship between the empirical parameters in the master curve and the true material properties. The modified theory presented here is a major step forward in the fundamental understanding of starch gelatinization and the ability to use predictive models for optimization of industrial manufacturing processes.</p>","PeriodicalId":103,"journal":{"name":"Soft Matter","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143497725","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"化学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Soft MatterPub Date : 2025-02-26DOI: 10.1039/d4sm01478b
Joseph Pollard, Richard G Morris
{"title":"Defect dynamics in cholesterics: beyond the Peach-Koehler force.","authors":"Joseph Pollard, Richard G Morris","doi":"10.1039/d4sm01478b","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1039/d4sm01478b","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The Peach-Koehler force between disclination lines was originally formulated in the study of crystalline solids, and has since been adopted to provide a notion of interactions between disclination lines in nematic liquid crystals. Here, we argue that the standard formulation of this interaction force seemingly fails for materials where there is a symmetry-broken ground state, and suggest that this is due to the interaction between disclination lines and merons: non-singular yet non-trivial topological solitons. We examine this in the context of chiral nematic (cholesteric) liquid crystals, which provide a natural setting for studying these interactions due to their energetic preference for meron tubes in the form of double-twist cylinders. Through a combination of theory and simulation we demonstrate that, for sufficiently strong chirality, defects of +1/2 winding will change their winding through the emission of a meron line, and that interactions between the merons and defects dominate over defect-defect interactions. Instead of the Peach-Koehler framework, we employ a method based on contact topology-the Gray stability theorem-to directly calculate the velocity field of the material. We apply our framework to point defects as well as disclination lines. Our results have implications not just for chiral materials, but also for other phases with modulated ground states, such as the twist-bend and splay-bend nematics.</p>","PeriodicalId":103,"journal":{"name":"Soft Matter","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143497727","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"化学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Soft MatterPub Date : 2025-02-26DOI: 10.1039/D5SM90035B
Charles Parton-Barr, Helen F. Gleeson and Richard J. Mandle
{"title":"Correction: Room-temperature ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal showing a large and diverging density","authors":"Charles Parton-Barr, Helen F. Gleeson and Richard J. Mandle","doi":"10.1039/D5SM90035B","DOIUrl":"10.1039/D5SM90035B","url":null,"abstract":"<p >Correction for ‘Room-temperature ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal showing a large and diverging density’ by Charles Parton-Barr <em>et al.</em>, <em>Soft Matter</em>, 2024, <strong>20</strong>, 672–680, https://doi.org/10.1039/D3SM01282D.</p>","PeriodicalId":103,"journal":{"name":"Soft Matter","volume":" 11","pages":" 2182-2182"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2025/sm/d5sm90035b?page=search","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143497726","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"化学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Soft MatterPub Date : 2025-02-26DOI: 10.1039/d4sm01363h
Pampa Dey, Abhishek Thakur, Aarsh Chotalia, Amitabha Nandi, P Parmananda
{"title":"Run-and-tumble like motion of a camphor-infused Marangoni swimmer.","authors":"Pampa Dey, Abhishek Thakur, Aarsh Chotalia, Amitabha Nandi, P Parmananda","doi":"10.1039/d4sm01363h","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1039/d4sm01363h","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>'Run-and-tumble' (RT) motion has been a subject of intense research for several decades. Many organisms, such as bacteria, perform such motion in the presence or absence of local chemical concentration gradients and it is found to be advantageous in search processes. Although there are previous reports involving the successful design of non-living self-propelled particles exhibiting such motion in the presence of external stimuli (chemical/mechanical), RT motion with 'rest' has not yet been observed for autonomous non-living active particles. We have designed a swimmer that performs motion using a combination of 'run', 'tumble', and 'rest' states with stochastic transitions. In the present scenario, it arises solely due to self-generated local surface tension gradients. We quantify the residence time statistics by analyzing the swimmer trajectories from the experimental data, which suggests that the 'rest' and 'tumble' states are more frequent than 'run'. Then, we quantify the motion properties by computing the mean squared displacement, which shows that the swimmer performs ballistic motion on a short time scale and then slows down due to tumbling and resting. To validate the observed transport properties, we introduce a minimal model of a chiral active Brownian particle, stochastically switching between three internal states. The model parameters were extracted from the experiments, which rendered a good agreement between the experiments and simulations.</p>","PeriodicalId":103,"journal":{"name":"Soft Matter","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143497729","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"化学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Soft MatterPub Date : 2025-02-25DOI: 10.1039/d4sm00705k
Lathika Vaniyan, Pallab Kumar Borah, Galina E Pavlovskaya, Nick Terrill, Joshua E S J Reid, Michael Boehm, Philippe Prochasson, Reed A Nicholson, Stefan Baier, Gleb E Yakubov
{"title":"Wet spinning of sodium carboxymethyl cellulose-sodium caseinate hydrogel fibres: relationship between rheology and spinnability.","authors":"Lathika Vaniyan, Pallab Kumar Borah, Galina E Pavlovskaya, Nick Terrill, Joshua E S J Reid, Michael Boehm, Philippe Prochasson, Reed A Nicholson, Stefan Baier, Gleb E Yakubov","doi":"10.1039/d4sm00705k","DOIUrl":"10.1039/d4sm00705k","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Mimicking the fibrous structures of meat is a significant challenge as natural plant protein assemblies lack the fibrous organisation ubiquitous in mammalian muscle tissues. In this work, wet-spun hydrogel fibres resembling the anisotropic fibrous microstructure of meat are fabricated using carboxymethyl cellulose as a model polysaccharide and sodium caseinate as a model protein which are crosslinked using 1-ethyl-3-(3-dimethylaminopropyl)carbodiimide (EDC). Hydrogels and spun fibres were characterised using a combination of rheology (shear, oscillatory, and extensional), microscopy (light, polarised, and fluorescence), rheo-NMR, and X-ray diffraction. Examination of structuring behaviour under shear uncovered a relationship between enhanced biopolymer orientation along the fibre axis and a viscoelastic time-dependent ageing window for optimal hydrogel spinnability. This study provides novel rheological and structural insights into mechanisms of protein-polysaccharide assembly that may prove instrumental for development of tuneable fibres for applications in plant-based foods, tissue engineering, and biomaterials.</p>","PeriodicalId":103,"journal":{"name":"Soft Matter","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11852227/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143490185","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"化学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Soft MatterPub Date : 2025-02-25DOI: 10.1039/d4sm01324g
Ram Sudhir Sharma, Alban Sauret
{"title":"Experimental models for cohesive granular materials: a review.","authors":"Ram Sudhir Sharma, Alban Sauret","doi":"10.1039/d4sm01324g","DOIUrl":"10.1039/d4sm01324g","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Granular materials are involved in most industrial and environmental processes, as well as many civil engineering applications. Although significant advances have been made in understanding the statics and dynamics of cohesionless grains over the past decades, most granular systems we encounter often display some adhesive forces between grains. The presence of cohesion has effects at distances substantially larger than the closest neighbors and consequently can greatly modify their overall behavior. While considerable progress has been made in understanding and describing cohesive granular systems through idealized numerical simulations, controlled experiments corroborating and expanding the wide range of behavior remain challenging to perform. In recent years, various experimental approaches have been developed to control inter-particle adhesion that now pave the way to further our understanding of cohesive granular flows. This article reviews different approaches for making particles sticky, controlling their relative stickiness, and thereby studying their granular and bulk mechanics. Some recent experimental studies relying on model cohesive grains are synthesized, and opportunities and perspectives in this field are discussed.</p>","PeriodicalId":103,"journal":{"name":"Soft Matter","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143490184","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"化学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Soft MatterPub Date : 2025-02-25DOI: 10.1039/d4sm01443j
Ramanand Singh Yadav, Rajarshi Chakrabarti
{"title":"Demixing of an active-passive binary mixture through a two-dimensional elastic meshwork.","authors":"Ramanand Singh Yadav, Rajarshi Chakrabarti","doi":"10.1039/d4sm01443j","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1039/d4sm01443j","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Separation of particles based on motility is a daunting task, especially when the particles are of the same size and the density is low. We propose and demonstrate how a dilute monodisperse mixture of active-passive particles can be separated by introducing an elastic meshwork. Our <i>in silico</i> method does not rely on any external stimuli, rather the mesh size and stiffness of the meshwork control the demixing. There is a threshold activity above which demixing starts and below this, particles exert pressure on the meshwork that relaxes upon permeation. Our findings are in principle experimentally testable and open up new avenues for active-passive separation, where clustering of particles is not feasible.</p>","PeriodicalId":103,"journal":{"name":"Soft Matter","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-02-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143490182","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"化学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}