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This Editorial reports how the depletion force theory was originally developed by Sho Asakura and Fumio Oosawa and how their one-page paper was "rediscovered" about 20 years after the paper was published. The first part of this Editorial is mostly based on the lecture by Oosawa and his autobiographies, and the second part is written by one of two scientists who found the paper. The aim of this Editorial is to record the background of the discovery of the depletion force. We believe that this Editorial presents an interesting story showing how science develops. The story reminds us of the importance of basic education and continuous interests in unknown phenomena and interactions between people of different disciplines, although they are sometimes considered as separate elements of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on phase and aggregation behavior for linear chains composed of blocks of hydrophilic and hydrophobic segments. Phase and conformational transitions of patterned chains are relevant for understanding liquid–liquid separation of biomolecular condensates, which play a prominent role in cellular biophysics and for surfactant and polymer applications. Previous studies of simple models for multiblock chains have shown that, depending on the sequence pattern and chain length, such systems can fall into one of two categories: displaying either phase separation or aggregation into finite-size clusters. The key new result of this paper is that both formation of finite-size aggregates and phase separation can be observed for certain chain architectures at appropriate conditions of temperature and concentration. For such systems, a bulk dense liquid condenses from a dilute phase that already contains multi-chain finite-size aggregates. The computational approach used in this study involves several distinct steps using histogram-reweighting grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations, which are described in some level of detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years there has been a rapid growth in the development and application of new stochastic methods in electronic structure. These methods are quite diverse, from many-body wave function techniques in real space or determinant space to being used to sum perturbative expansions. This growth has been spurred by the more favorable scaling with the number of electrons and often better parallelization over large numbers of central processing unit (CPU) cores or graphical processing units (GPUs) than for high-end non-stochastic wave function based methods. This special issue of the Journal of Chemical Physics includes 33 papers that describe recent developments and applications in this area. As seen from the articles in the issue, stochastic electronic structure methods are applicable to both molecules and solids and can accurately describe systems with strong electron correlation. This issue was motivated, in part, by the 2019 Telluride Science Research Center workshop on Stochastic Electronic Structure Methods that we organized. Below we briefly describe each of the papers in the special issue, dividing the papers into six subtopics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solvation dynamics in ionic liquids show features that are often associated with supercooled liquids, including "stretched" nonexponential relaxation. To better understand the mechanism behind the stretching, the nonlinear mode-correlation methods proposed in Paper I [S. R. Hodge and M. A. Berg, J. Chem. Phys. 155, 024122 (2021)] are applied to a simulation of a prototypical ionic liquid. A full Green's function is recovered. In addition, specific tests for non-Gaussian dynamics are made. No deviations from Gaussian dynamics are found. This finding is incompatible with rate heterogeneity as a cause of the nonexponential relaxation and appears to be in conflict with an earlier multidimensional analysis of the same data. Although this conflict is not resolved here, this work does demonstrate the practicality of mode-correlation analysis in the face of finite datasets and calculations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study and modeling of water exchange in complex media using different applications of diffusion and relaxation magnetic resonance (MR) have been of interest in recent years. Most models attempt to describe this process using a first order kinetics expression, which is appropriate to describe chemical exchange; however, it may not be suitable to describe diffusion-driven exchange since it has no direct relationship to diffusion dynamics of water molecules. In this paper, these limitations are addressed through a more general exchange expression that does consider such important properties. This exchange fraction expression features a multi-exponential recovery at short times and a mono-exponential decay at long times, both of which are not captured by the first order kinetics expression. Furthermore, simplified exchange expressions containing partial information of the analyzed system's diffusion and relaxation processes and geometry are proposed, which can potentially be employed in already established estimation protocols. Finally, exchange fractions estimated from simulated MR data and derived here were compared, showing qualitative similarities but quantitative differences, suggesting that the features of the derived exchange fraction in this paper can be partially recovered by employing an existing estimation framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biased and accelerated molecular simulations (BAMS) are widely used tools to observe relevant molecular phenomena occurring on time scales inaccessible to standard molecular dynamics, but evaluation of the physical time scales involved in the processes is not directly possible from them. For this reason, the problem of recovering dynamics from such kinds of simulations is the object of very active research due to the relevant theoretical and practical implications of dynamics on the properties of both natural and synthetic molecular systems. In a recent paper [A. Rapallo et al., J. Comput. Chem. 42, 586–599 (2021)], it has been shown how the coupling of BAMS (which destroys the dynamics but allows to calculate average properties) with Extended Diffusion Theory (EDT) (which requires input appropriate equilibrium averages calculated over the BAMS trajectories) allows to effectively use the Smoluchowski equation to calculate the orientational time correlation function of the head–tail unit vector defined over a peptide in water solution. Orientational relaxation of this vector is the result of the coupling of internal molecular motions with overall molecular rotation, and it was very well described by correlation functions expressed in terms of weighted sums of suitable time-exponentially decaying functions, in agreement with a Brownian diffusive regime. However, situations occur where exponentially decaying functions are no longer appropriate to capture the actual dynamical behavior, which exhibits persistent long time correlations, compatible with the so called subdiffusive regimes. In this paper, a generalization of EDT will be given, exploiting a fractional Smoluchowski equation (FEDT) to capture the non-exponential character observed in the relaxation of intramolecular distances and molecular radius of gyration, whose dynamics depend on internal molecular motions only. The calculation methods, proper to EDT, are adapted to implement the generalization of the theory, and the resulting algorithm confirms FEDT as a tool of practical value in recovering dynamics from BAMS, to be used in general situations, involving both regular and anomalous diffusion regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the importance of rhodium complexes in catalysis, and the favorable 100% natural abundance of the spin-1/2 103Rh nucleus, there are few reports of 103Rh nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) parameters in the literature. In part, this is the consequence of the very low gyromagnetic ratio of 103Rh and its dismal NMR sensitivity. In a previous paper [Harbor-Collins et al., J. Chem. Phys. 159, 104 307 (2023)], we demonstrated an NMR methodology for 1H-enhanced 103Rh NMR and demonstrated an application to the 103Rh NMR of the dirhodium formate paddlewheel complex. In this paper, we employ selective 18O labeling to break the magnetic equivalence of the 103Rh spin pair of dirhodium formate. This allows the estimation of the 103Rh–103Rh spin–spin coupling and provides access to the 103Rh singlet state. We present the first measurement of a 18O-induced 103Rh secondary isotope shift as well as the first instance of singlet order generated in a 103Rh spin pair. The field-dependence of 103Rh singlet relaxation is measured by field-cycling NMR experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]