The liquid crystal phase behavior of linear and partially flexible hard-sphere chain fluids and the solubility of hard spheres in hard-sphere chain fluids are studied by constant pressure Monte Carlo simulations. An extensive study on the phase behavior of linear fluids with a length of 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 20 beads is carried out. The phase behavior of partially flexible fluids...

A simple analytic theory for mixtures of hard spheres and larger polymers with excluded volume interactions is developed. The mixture is shown to exhibit extensive immiscibility. For large polymers with strong excluded volume interactions, the density of monomers at the critical point for demixing decreases as one over the square root of the length of the polymer, while the density of spheres t...

Gastric emptying of indigestible solids depends on their size. It is not clear whether physical characteristics other than particle size affect emptying of indigestible solids from the fasting human stomach. We studied gastric emptying of three differently shaped particles, (cubes, spheres, rods) of either hard or soft consistency during the fasting state in human volunteers. The shape of indig...

We describe an alternative method for performing isothermal-isobaric Monte Carlo simulations of crystalline solids. This method uses thermodynamics to estimate appropriate scaling of coordinates relative to their nominal lattice sites in order to increase the probability of acceptance of volume changes. We test this coordinate scaling with three systems: hard spheres, Lennard-Jones spheres, and...

We investigate the phase behavior of a model for colloidal hard platelets and rigid discotic molecules: oblate hard spherocylinders (OHSC). We perform free energy calculations using Monte Carlo simulations to map out the phase diagram as a function of the aspect ratio L∕D of the particles. The phase diagram displays a stable isotropic phase, a nematic liquid crystal phase for L∕D≤0.12, a column...

Previous studies of haptic search for object properties have shown efficient perception of various haptic features. In this study, the saliency of hardness and softness was investigated in a search task. In Experiment 1, blindfolded participants had to grasp a bundle ...

The phase transition from an isotropic to a nematic phase for a classical uid of hard ellipsoids has been studied using a version of a theory originally due to Onsager and by computer simulation. In the proposed form of the Onsager theory for the Helmholtz free energy, both the second and the third virial coeecients are treated exactly, but the fourth and higher virials are resummed in a manner...

Colloidal particles with a dielectric constant (magnetic susceptibility) mismatch with the surrounding solvent acquire a dipole moment in a homogeneous external electric (magnetic) field. The resulting dipolar interactions can lead to aggregation of the particles into string-like clusters. Recently, several methods have been developed to make these structures permanent. However, especially when...

Using aggregation-volume-bias Monte Carlo simulations along with successive umbrella sampling and histogram re-weighting, we study the phase diagram of a system of dumbbells formed by two touching spheres having variable sizes, as well as different interaction properties. The first sphere (h) interacts with all other spheres belonging to different dumbbells with a hard-sphere potential. The sec...