Reaction-induced morphological transitions in a blend of diblock copolymers and reactive monomers: dissipative particle dynamics simulation.

The dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) method is applied to the morphological transitions of microphase-separated domains in a mixture of symmetric AB-diblock copolymers and reactive C-monomers, where polymerization and cross-linking reactions take place among C-monomers. The initial structure for the DPD simulation is an equilibrated cylindrical domain structure prepared by the density-biased Monte Carlo method with density profiles obtained from the self-consistent field theory. By introducing a cross-linking reaction among reactive C-monomers, we confirmed that the DPD simulation reproduces the morphological transitions observed in experiments, where the domain morphology changes due to segregation between A-blocks of diblock copolymers and cross-linking networks of C-monomers.

Heat capacity of simple liquids in light of hydrodynamics as U(1) gauge theory.

We investigate the heat capacity of simple liquids through a theoretical approach based on a quasiparticle description. By interpreting the microscopic dynamics of particles in liquids in terms of quasiparticles, we suggest a simplified understanding of the number of degrees of freedom in liquids. A equivalence between hydrodynamics and U(1) gauge theory, which is proposed in the present paper, develops the quasiparticle description to construct a new Lagrangian which correctly reproduces the number of modes at the melting points and at the critical points.