Hydrodynamic instabilities and interfacial phenomena
The development of new strategies to measure interfacial tensions in simple or complex fluids represents one of my current research activities. For example, hydrodynamic instabilities can be considered as one of the most natural ways to deform an interface, and can be employed to probe interfacial stresses...
Some selected publications
Phys. Rev. Lett., 112, 128303, 2014.
Phys. Rev. X, 6, 041057, 2016.
Phys. Rev. Fluids, 5, 074001, 2020.
Dynamics and metastable states in soft matter
In the last few years I have been investigating the existence of glassy states and yielding phenomena in "ultra-soft" colloidal suspensions via linear and non-linear rheology. Concentrated suspensions of star-shaped polymers and microgels represent well-known dynamically arrested soft systems and their rheology can be tuned by changing the colloid-colloid interaction...
Some selected publications:
Phys. Rev. Lett., 111, 208301, 2013
Phys Rev E, 97040601(R),2018
Nat. Phys., 19, 1673-1679, 2023
Heterogeneously charged colloids and microgels
Interaction of charged particles, induced by adding an oppositely charged polyion, gives rise to intriguing aggregation phenomena. The presence of short-range interactions in competition with electrostatic repulsions results, in an interval of concentrations around the inversion point, in the formation of longlived clusters of polyelectrolyte-decorated particles (pd-particles). I showed that the effective interaction between the pd-partcicles is characterized by a potential barrier, whose height depends on the net charge and on the nonuniformity of their surface charge distribution and that such potential is responsible for the formation of kinetically arrested cluster phases. In the last few years my research focused also on thermosensitive microgels and how they allow tuning charge density and adsorption...
Some selected publications:
Soft Matter, 8(36), 9384, 2012
J. Chem. Phys., 133, 024901, 2010
Polymers, 13(7), 1153, 2021
PNAS, 138 (37), e2109560118 2021
Mixtures on spherical surfaces
In the meanwhile I also run some simulations...
I'm interested in understanding the role of particle adsorption in fluid demixing. Motivated by observations of the heterogeneous domain structure on the surface of cells and vesicles and by domain formation due to the adsorption of complex molecules onto composite membranes, I consider a minimal quasi-2D model to describe the structure of binary mixtures confined on the surface of a spherical particle. Recently I have studied the effect of adsorbing particles on mixture structure and void formation...
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J. Chem. Phys, 156, 034904, 2022
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