No Arabic abstract
Deformation of a fluid interface caused by the presence of objects at the interface can lead to large lateral forces between the objects. We explore these fluid-mediated attractive force between partially submerged vertical cylinders. Forces are experimentally measured by slowly separating cylinder pairs and cylinder triplets after capillary rise is initially established for cylinders in contact. For cylinder pairs, numerical computations and a theoretical model are found to be in good agreement with measurements. The model provides insight into the relative importance of the contributions to the total force. For small separations, the pressure term dominates, while at large separations, surface tension becomes more important. A cross-over between the two regimes occurs at a separation of around half of a capillary length. The experimentally measured forces between cylinder triplets are also in good agreement with numerical computations, and we show that pair-wise contributions account for nearly all of the attractive force between triplets. For cylinders with equilibrium capillary rise height greater than the height of the cylinder, we find that the attractive force depends on the height of the cylinders above the submersion level, which provides a means to create precisely-controlled tunable cohesive forces between objects deforming a fluid interface.
We investigate the evolution of a system of colloidal particles, trapped at a fluid interface and interacting via capillary attraction, as function of the range of the capillary interaction and temperature. We address the collapse of an initially homogeneous particle distribution and of a radially symmetric (disk--shaped) distribution of finite size, both theoretically by using a perturbative approach inspired by cosmological models and numerically by means of Brownian dynamics (BD) and dynamical density functional theory (DDFT). The results are summarized in a dynamical phase diagram, describing a smooth crossover from collective (gravitational-like) collapse to local (spinodal-like) clustering. In this crossover region, the evolution exhibits a peculiar shock wave behavior at the outer rim of the contracting, disk-shaped distribution.
The effective force between two parallel DNA molecules is calculated as a function of their mutual separation for different valencies of counter- and salt ions and different salt concentrations. Computer simulations of the primitive model are used and the shape of the DNA molecules is accurately modelled using different geometrical shapes. We find that multivalent ions induce a significant attraction between the DNA molecules whose strength can be tuned by the averaged valency of the ions. The physical origin of the attraction is traced back either to electrostatics or to entropic contributions. For multivalent counter- and monovalent salt ions, we find a salt-induced stabilization effect: the force is first attractive but gets repulsive for increasing salt concentration. Furthermore, we show that the multivalent-ion-induced attraction does not necessarily correlate with DNA overcharging.
The stability of the equilibrium configurations of a nematic liquid crystal confined between two coaxial cylinders is analysed when a radial electric field is applied and the flexoelectric effect is taken into account. The threshold for perturbations depending only on the radius r in the cylindrical coordinate system and strong boundary conditions is studied. A new type of orientational transition caused by pure flexoelectric effect is found.
The movement of the particles in a capillary electrophoretic system under electroosmotic flow was modeled using Monte Carlo simulation with Metropolis algorithm. Two different cases, with repulsive and attractive interactions between molecules were taken into consideration. The simulation was done using a spin-like system where the interactions between the nearest and second closest neighbors were considered in two separate steps of the modeling study. A total of 20 different cases with different rate of interactions for both repulsive and attractive interactions were modeled. The movement of the particles through the capillary is defined as current. At a low interaction level between molecules, a regular electroosmotic flow is obtained, on the other hand, with increasing interactions between molecules the current shows a phase transition behavior. The results also show that a modular electroosmotic flow can be obtained for separations by tuning the ratio between molecular interactions and electric field strength.
We present a theory for the interaction between motile particles in an elastic medium on a substrate, relying on two arguments: a moving particle creates a strikingly fore-aft asymmetric distortion in the elastic medium; this strain field reorients other particles. We show that this leads to sensing, attraction and pursuit, with a non-reciprocal character, between a pair of motile particles. We confirm the predicted distortion fields and non-mutual trail-following in our experiments and simulations on polar granular rods made motile by vibration, moving through a dense monolayer of beads in its crystalline phase. Our theory should be of relevance to the interaction of motile cells in the extracellular matrix or in a supported layer of gel or tissue.