The Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation has selected our project, Unveiling the fundamental path for the design of stimuli-responsive smart nanomaterials (GENESIS) for funding.

Project ID: PID2022-136540NB-I00
Duration: 01/09/2023 a 31/08/2027

GENESIS will explore the physics of stimuli-responsive nanomaterials, which reversibly adapt to external stimuli, switching between mutually exclusive configurations. These smart nanomaterials have attracted the attention of the research community for their revolutionary applications across disciplines, including drug delivery and wastewater treatments. Their ability to respond to environmental changes is controlled by the interactions established at the nanoscopic scale between their building blocks (nanoparticles), which can alter the material’s structural properties and thus spark new functionalities at the macroscale. Despite the fact that stimuli-responsive nanomaterials have already been employed in a wide spectrum of disciplines, such as medicine, materials templating and robotics, our current understanding of their behaviour is still far from being complete. This is most likely due to the complexity arising from the above-mentioned relationship between interactions, structure and properties, being established at very small length and time scales and fully unfolding at macroscopic scales, determining the material’s performance and its technological potential. GENESIS will apply state-of-the-art numerical simulation, density functional theory and a wide spectrum of experimental techniques (microscopy, spectroscopy, light scattering, rheometry) to (1) investigate the microscopic origin of the interactions determining the phase behaviour of smart stimuli-responsive fluids according to the degree of softness of their constituent NPs; (2) unveil the mechanisms controlling the kinetics of their responsiveness; and (3) measure the impact of their stimuli-driven structural change on transport properties.

Participating institutions:

List of publications

Included are the publications that, to date, explicitly acknowledge financial support to GENESIS.

A. Escañuela-Copado, A. Martín-Molina, A. Patti, Molecular simulation of hybrid polymer nanocomposites with organic nanodimers and inorganic nanorods: from structure and dynamics to viscosity, The Journal of Chemical Physics, 162, 174906, 2025
J. Slepavicius, A. Patti, C. Avendaño, Predicting self-diffusion coefficients of small molecular fluids using machine learning and the statistical associating fluid theory for Mie segments, Physics of Fluids, 37, 017129, 2025
M. Tirado-Miranda, M. Vicario-De-La-Torre, and A. B. Jódar-Reyes, eds. 2025. Soft Nanoparticles for Biomedical Applications. Vol. 69. Nanoscience & Nanotechnology Series. Cambridge: Royal Society of Chemistry.
A. Moncho, S. Groh, J. Dzubiella, External field-driven property localization in liquids of responsive macromolecules, The Journal of Chemical Physics, 160, 024904, 2024
F. A. García Daza, A. M. Puertas, A. Cuetos, A. Patti, An Insight into the Viscoelasticity of Self-Assembling Smectic Liquid Crystals of Colloidal Rods from Active Microrheology Simulations, Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, 20, 1579-1589, 2024
J. López, A. Moncho, M. Tirado-Miranda, Measuring Absolute Velocities Using Non-Equilibrium Oscillations via Homodyne Dynamic Light Scattering, Physical Review Letters, 133, 198202, 2024.
L. Tonti, F. A. García Daza, J. M. Romero Enrique, A. Patti, Structural and dynamical equilibrium properties of hard board-like particles in parallel confinement, The Journal of Chemical Physics, 160, 124903, 2024
M. Pedrosa-Bustos, A. Moncho, M. J. Gálvez-Ruiz, M. Kanduc, Impact of cholesterol on the structure and phase separation of DPPC Langmuir monolayers: Experiments and simulations, Surf. Interfaces 15, 104757, 2024.
F. A. García Daza, A. M. Puertas, A. Cuetos, A. Patti, Superdiffusion and heterogeneous dynamics in liquid crystals by microrheology, Molecular Physics, 122 (21-22), 2024
JL, S. Groh, JD, A. Moncho, Nonequilibrium relaxation of soft responsive colloids, The Journal of Chemical Physics, 161, 094902, 2024.
J. López, M. Tirado-Miranda, J. Dzubiella, A. Moncho, Density functional theory of responsive hard-sphere fluids, Mol. Phys. 122, (21-22), 2024.
A. Escañuela-Copado, J. López, M. Kanduc, A. B. Jódar-Reyes, M. Tirado-Miranda, D. Bastos-González, J. M. Peula- García, I. Adroher-Benítez, A. Moncho, Diffusion and Interaction Effects On Molecular Release Kinetics From Collapsed Microgels, ACS Applied Polymer Materials, 6, 8905-8917, 2024.