The conformations of three cholate foldamers and one molecular basket were studied by fluorescence and NMR spectroscopy. In nonpolar solvents (e.g., hexane/ethyl acetate or ethyl acetate) mixed with a small amount of a polar solvent (e.g., alcohol or DMSO), the cholate oligomer folded into a helix with the hydrophilic faces of the cholates turned inward. Folding created a hydrophilic nanocavity...

We propose a fast and robust scheme for the direct minimization of Ohta-Kawasaki energy that characterizes microphase separation diblock copolymer melts. The employs globally convergent modified Newton method with line search which is shown to be mass-conservative, energy-descending, asymptotically quadratically convergent, three orders magnitude more efficient than commonly-used gradient flow ...

The authors examine the possibility of a two-step nucleation to the bulk condensation transition that proceeds via a metastable liquid cluster intermediate having some preferred size. The metastable intermediate is stabilized by electrostatic repulsion, which becomes screened by small mobile ions at sufficiently large cluster sizes, thus allowing the eventual condensation to a bulk phase. Our c...