Van der Waals-coupled materials, ranging from multilayers of graphene and MoS(2) to superlattices of nanoparticles, exhibit rich emerging behaviour owing to quantum coupling between individual nanoscale constituents. Double-walled carbon nanotubes provide a model system for studying such quantum coupling mediated by van der Waals interactions, because each constituent single-walled nanotube can...

We perform molecular dynamics simulations of the hydrophobic collapse of two paraffin plates to examine how the collapse is mediated by realistic paraffin-water attractive van der Waals forces. We explore several aspects of the drying transition between the plates, including the critical separation for drying and the critical size of the vapor bubble required for the nucleation of the drying ev...

The adhesion force due to capillary interaction between two hydrophilic surfaces is strongly dependent on the partial pressure of water and is often calculated using the Kelvin equation. The validity of the Kelvin equation is questionable at low relative humidity (RH) of water, like in high vacuum and dry nitrogen environments, where water is only present as layers of several molecules thick at...

Supercurrent flow between two superconductors with different order parameters, a phenomenon known as the Josephson effect, can be achieved by inserting a non-superconducting material between two superconductors to decouple their wavefunctions. These Josephson junctions have been employed in fields ranging from digital to quantum electronics, yet their functionality is limited by the interface q...

The nonlocal correlation energy in the van der Waals density functional (vdW-DF) method can be interpreted in terms of a coupling of zero-point energies of characteristic modes of semilocal exchange-correlation (xc) holes. These xc holes reflect the internal functional in the framework of the vdW-DF method. We explore the internal xc hole components, showing that they share properties with thos...

The interactions between mineral and collagen phases in the ultrastructural level play an important role in determining the mechanical properties of bone tissue. Three types of mineral-collagen interaction (i.e., ionic interactions, hydrogen/van der Waals bonds, and van der Waals/viscous shear in opening/sliding mode, respectively) have been simulated in this study, using cohesive zone-modeling...