Critical microphase properties of crosslinked polymer blends with quenched random impurities

We extend published works dealing with microphase separation in crosslinked polymer blends to the case where these are surrounded by random impurities. To study their influence on critical microphase properties, from a static and kinetics point of view, we first assume that the (real) disorder caused by impurities is quenched. Second, the replica theory is used to study such critical properties, upon the impurities concentration and their interaction strength. More precisely, we compute the spinodal temperature and structure factor. We find that the spinodal temperature is shifted towards its lower and higher values, for attractive and repulsive impurities, respectively. The obtained expression for the static structure factor suggests that, contrarily to repulsive impurities, the crosslinked mixture scatters better in the presence of attractive ones. Thereafter, the study is extended to kinetics of microphase separation, when the mixture is impregnated by small random impurities. Kinetics is investigated through the growth rate, and in particular, we demonstrate that the latter is increased by the presence of repulsive impurities. This is natural, since these play a stabilizer role. Finally, the discussion is extended to crosslinked polymer blends immersed in a good solvent, which induces drastic changes of the critical microphase properties.     

Inter-lamellar interactions modulated by addition of guest components

We have investigated the effects of a guest component (polymer or spherical colloidal particle) confined between flexible lamellar slits on the inter-lamellar interaction by means of a small-angle X-ray scattering technique and a neutron spin echo technique. The dominant interaction between flexible lamellar membranes without guest components is the Helfrich mechanism. The addition of a neutral polymer into the lamellar phase induces an attractive inter-lamellar interaction and finally destabilizes the lamellar phase. On the other hand, spherical colloidal particles confined between flexible lamellar membranes reduce the undulational fluctuations of lamellae and bring a repulsive inter-lamellar interaction. The behavior of the layer compression modulus of the lamellar membrane containing colloidal particles is well described by the entropical repulsive inter-lamellar interaction driven by steric hindrance.Received: 26 March 2004, Published online: 4 May 2004PACS: 82.70.Uv Surfactants, micellar solutions, vesicles, lamellae, amphiphilic systems, (hydrophilic and hydrophobic interactions) - 61.25.Hq Macromolecular and polymer solutions; polymer melts; swelling - 83.80.Hj Suspensions, dispersions, pastes, slurries, colloids - 89.75.Fb Structures and organization in complex systems     

Helfrich repulsion and dynamical phase separation of multicomponent lipid bilayers

Thermal fluctuations of surfactant bilayers in an aqueous solution produce an effective, long-range repulsion that can lead to a continuous unbinding transition. We report on an optical interferometry study of the thermal fluctuations of multicomponent bilayers close to the unbinding transition. We find that, in contrast to the case of single-component bilayers, the thermal fluctuation spectrum of multicomponent bilayers does not agree with a continuous unbinding transition but instead indicates the proximity of an unbinding tricritical point.     

Enhancement of steric repulsion with temperature in oriented lipid multilayers

We have studied the temperature dependence of the stacking periodicity, d, of oriented phospholipid multilayers using grazing angle neutron scattering techniques. d is found to increase substantially at higher temperatures, just before the bilayers peel off from the substrate. Although we do not observe thermal unbinding, our results are consistent with the notion that the unbinding transition is driven by steric repulsion arising from thermal fluctuations of the membranes, in contrast to those of a recent study by Vogel et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 84, 390 (2000)].     

On the theory of impurities in a lattice of magnetic ions: Crystalline field effects

We present a formalism for treating the problem of impurities in a lattice of magnetic rare earth ions. Latter are subject to a crystalline field and special attention is paid to non-Kramers ions in a singlet ground state. Our calculations are restricted to the paramagnetic regime. We derive the conditions for magnetic localized modes to occur and discuss the appearance of local magnetic instabilities. It is shown that the impurity effects are especially large if the system is close to a magnetic phase transition. Furthermore we compute the influence of impurities on the magnetic transition temperature. For the case of vacancies or nonmagnetic impurities the dependence of the Curie temperature on impurity concentration is derived. It is demonstrated that small amounts of impurities can often completely suppress magnetic ordering.     

Adhesion of membranes with competing specific and generic interactions

Biomimetic membranes in contact with a planar substrate or a second membrane are studied theoretically. The membranes contain specific adhesion molecules (stickers) which are attracted by the second surface. In the absence of stickers, the trans-interaction between the membrane and the second surface is assumed to be repulsive at short separations. It is shown that the interplay of specific attractive and generic repulsive interactions can lead to the formation of a potential barrier. This barrier induces a line tension between bound and unbound membrane segments which results in lateral phase separation during adhesion. The mechanism for adhesion-induced phase separation is rather general, as is demonstrated by considering two distinct cases involving: i) stickers with a linear attractive potential, and ii) stickers with a short-ranged square-well potential. In both cases, membrane fluctuations reduce the potential barrier and, therefore, decrease the tendency of phase separation. Received 24 January 2002 and Received in final form 24 April 2002     

Binding of similarly charged plates with counterions only

Similarly and highly charged plates in the presence of multivalent counterions attract each other and form electrostatically bound states. Using Monte-Carlo simulations, we obtain the interplate pressure in the global parameter space. The equilibrium plate separation, where the pressure changes from attractive to repulsive, exhibits a novel unbinding transition. A systematic and asymptotically exact strong-coupling field theory yields the bound state from a competition between counterion entropy and electrostatic attraction, in agreement with simple scaling arguments and simulations.     

Repulsive and attractive critical Casimir forces

When confining vacuum fluctuations between two identical walls, the Casimir force manifests itself as a mutual attraction of the walls. When confining concentration fluctuations of a binary liquid mixture, an analogous force should exist near the critical temperature T_C; it is called the critical Casimir force. Here we show experimentally that this purely entropic force can be either attractive or repulsive, depending on the boundary conditions for the fluctuations. For symmetrical boundary conditions an attractive force is found while asymmetrical ones lead to a repulsive force. This is observed directly by confining the fluctuations in a thin wetting film. Depending on the boundary conditions either a thinning or a thickening of the film is observed when T→T_C.     

Repulsive and attractive Casimir forces between magnetodielectric slabs

The Casimir force between two parallel magnetodielectric slabs is investigated by means of Casimir–Lifshitz Theory. For two magnetodielectric slabs, one is permittivity-negative, while the other is permeability-negative in the real frequency space. Numerical results show that when the separation between these two slabs is small (or large), the Casimir force is repulsive, while for the intermediate separation, the Casimir force is attractive. As a consequence, there are two equilibria with zero Casimir force, and a repulsive–attractive–repulsive transition takes place with increasing the separation. Therefore, if the separation between two interacting slabs is manipulated in the small (or large) separation region, it is possible to overcome the stiction in micromechanical and nanomechanical systems.     

玻色爱因斯坦凝聚体中杂质的相互作用

文章研究了两个杂质浸入玻色凝聚体中的相互作用.通过使用微扰法,计算了在弱杂质-玻色子相互作用区域中的基态能量.结果表明基态能量与两杂质之间的相对距离有关.从基态能量出发,研究发现不管杂质与玻色子相互作用是处在排斥状态还是吸引状态,两杂质之间都有保持吸引趋势;而当一个杂质与玻色子相互作用是吸引时,另一个为排斥时,两个杂质之间呈现出了排斥的效果.通过杂质之间有效力的计算也验证了上述现象,进一步研究凝聚体密度背后的力学机制,再次得出了一致结论.     

Fluctuation-induced couplings between defect lines or particle chains

One-dimensional structures such as defect lines or chains of dipolar particles are generally subject to strong Landau-Peierls thermal fluctuations. Coupling between these fluctuations in parallel lines may lead to an attractive force, analogous to the London force, or to a repulsive force of entropic origin. We analyze these forces for chains of electric dipoles and for flux lines in isotropic superconductors. In the first case the force is attractive, and can significantly change the Hamaker constant, which governs the attraction between colloidal particles. In the second case, over much of the magnetic field-temperature phase diagram the force is repulsive, and dominates over the direct repulsive interaction between flux lines.     

Correlation functions in an exactly solvable tefface-ledge-kink model

We solve exactly a terrace-ledge-kink (TLK) model describing a vicinal section of a crystal surface at a microscopic level, with either repulsive or attractive interactions between the ledges. As expected there is a faceting, or reconstructive, phase transition, driven either by temperature or by the chemical potential, that controls the mean slope of the surface. In the rough phase we carry out a thorough investigation of microscopic thermal fluctuations of the interface. This is done by combining Bethe ansatz and Conformal Field Theory methods in order to calculate appropriately defined correlators.     

Repulsive Casimir force between gyroelectric slabs

We obtain the repulsive Casimir force between two parallel gyroelectric slabs, thus overcoming the difficulty that the repulsive Casimir force is difficult to achieve in a naturally occurring material. Under practically realizable parameters, we realize the crossover from attractive (repulsive) to repulsive (attractive) forces by changing either the external static magnetic field, the background permittivity of the gyroelectric medium, the slab’s thickness or the gap between the slabs. The proposed configuration, unlike the artificial metamaterial one, does not require the careful design of the material’s micro-structure, and hence is expected to be a practical candidate for obtaining a repulsive Casimir force.     

Strong-coupling electrostatics in the presence of dielectric inhomogeneities

We study the strong-coupling (SC) interaction between two like-charged membranes of finite thickness embedded in a medium of higher dielectric constant. A generalized SC theory is applied along with extensive Monte Carlo simulations to study the image charge effects induced by multiple dielectric discontinuities in this system. These effects lead to strong counterion crowding in the central region of the intersurface space upon increasing the solvent-membrane dielectric mismatch and change the membrane interactions from attractive to repulsive at small separations. These features agree quantitatively with the SC theory at elevated couplings or dielectric mismatch where the correlation hole around counterions is larger than the thickness of the central counterion layer.     

Quantum Monte Carlo simulations of bosonic and fermionic impurities in a two-dimensional hard-core boson system

A two-dimensional lattice hard-core boson system with a small fraction of bosonic or fermionic impurities is studied. The impurity hopping and interactions are identical to those of the dominant bosons, so that effects due to quantum statistics can be isolated. A quantum Monte Carlo scheme is developed in which bosonic paths are sampled and the impurities are introduced at the level of summing over permutation cycles. For both types of impurities, an anomaly in the effective impurity interaction energy is found at the Kosterlitz-Thouless temperature; it changes from attractive for T>T(KT) to repulsive for T相似文献   

Bose–Einstein condensates in a ring optical lattices trap

The evolution of Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs) loaded into a periodic ring optical lattices (OL) trap is studied. By means of the variational method and direct numerical simulations of the Gross–Pitaevskii (GP) equation, the ground state properties and the vortex stabilities of the condensates for both repulsive and attractive cases are investigated. The results show that the bound states exist for determinate OL strength and interatomic interaction. However, the ground states of BECs undergo delocalizing–localizing transition for both attractive and repulsive cases as the strength of the OL or the interatomic interaction is decreased below the critical value. The ring OL can suppress the delocalizing transition efficiently.     

Fluctuation-magnification of non-equilibrium membranes near a wall

Membranes in thermal equilibrium are well known to exhibit Brownian motion type shape fluctuations. Membranes containing active force centers -- such as chemically active membrane proteins -- suffer additional non-equilibrium shape fluctuations due to the activity of these force centers. We demonstrate, using scaling arguments, that non-equilibrium shape fluctuations are in general greatly amplified by the presence of a nearby wall or membrane due to the absence of a fluctuation-dissipation theorem. For adhesive membranes, this fluctuation magnification effect may facilitate the establishment of bonding. For non-adhesive membranes, fluctuation magnification produces a long-range repulsive pressure which can exceed the well known Helfrich repulsion due to purely thermal fluctuations. Received: 1 September 1997 / Accepted: 3 December 1997     

饱和对数非线性介质中非相干孤子碰撞对相干性的改善

基于相干密度理论，数值地研究了饱和对数非线性支持的部分非相干亮孤子对的相互作用.研究表明，两个非相干亮孤子碰撞不仅能增大碰撞区的光强，还可以大大改善部分非相干光束的相干性.同时还研究了非相干性对孤子碰撞的影响，非相干性不仅抑制了孤子间的相干作用如吸引、排斥和能量交换，同时还由于非相干叠加作用而引入了弱的相互吸引. 关键词： 非相干性 饱和对数非线性 空间光孤子     

Thermal unbinding of highly oriented phospholipid membranes

We present a temperature dependent x-ray reflectivity study of highly oriented, fully hydrated multilamellar phospholipid membranes. Both the specular and diffuse (nonspecular) x-ray reflectivity were measured for dimyristoyl-sn-glycero-phosphocholine (DMPC) and oleoyl-palmitoyl-sn-glycero-phosphocholine (POPC) on silicon substrates in excess water. In this configuration the repeat distance as well as the fluctuation spectra can be determined as a function of temperature. Both model systems studied exhibit a discontinuous unbinding transition from a substrate bound, multilamellar state to a state of freely dispersed bilayers in water. In the unbound phase a single membrane remains on the substrate.