Hydrogel-based drug delivery systems (DDSs) can leverage therapeutically beneficial outcomes in cancer therapy. In this domain, polyethylene glycol (PEG) has become increasingly popular as a biomedical polymer and has found clinical use. Owing to their excellent biocompatibility, facile modifiability, and high drug encapsulation rate, PEG hydrogels have shown great promise as drug delivery platforms. Here, the progress in emerging novel designs of PEG-hydrogels as DDSs for anti-cancer therapy is reviewed and discussed, focusing on underpinning multiscale release mechanisms categorized under stimuli-responsive and non-responsive drug release. The responsive drug delivery approaches are discussed, and the underpinning release mechanisms are elucidated, covering the systems functioning based on either exogenous stimuli-response, such as photo-and magnetic-sensitive PEG hydrogels, or endogenous stimuli-response, such as enzyme-, pH-, reduction-, and temperature-sensitive PEG hydrogels. Special attention is paid to the commercial potential of PEG-based hydrogels in cancer therapy, highlighting the limitations that need to be addressed in future research for their clinical translation.

We investigate the non-equilibrium dynamics across the miscible-immiscible phase separation in a binary mixture of Bose-Einstein condensates. The excitation spectra reveal that the Landau critical velocity vanishes at the critical point, where the superfluidity spontaneously breaks down. We analytically extract the dynamical critical exponent z=2 and static correlation length critical exponent v=1/2 from the Landau critical velocity. Moreover, by simulating the real-time dynamics across the critical point, we find the average domain number and the average bifurcation delay show universal scaling laws with respect to the quench time. We then numerically extract the static correlation length critical exponent v=1/2 and the dynamical critical exponent z=2 according to Kibble-Zurek mechanism. The scaling exponents (v=1/2, z=2) in the phase separation driven by quenching the atom-atom interaction are different from the ones (v=1/2, z=1) in the phase separation driven by quenching the Rabi coupling strength (2009 Phys. Rev. Lett. 102 070401; 2011 Phys. Rev. Lett. 107 230402). Our study explores the connections between the spontaneous superfluidity breakdown and the spontaneous defect formation in the phase separation dynamics.

We study three-leg-ladder optical lattices loaded with repulsive atomic Bose-Einstein condensates and subjected to artificial gauge fields. By employing the plane-wave analysis and variational approach, we analyze the band-gap structure of the energy spectrum and reveal the exotic swallowtail loop structures in the energy-level anti-crossing regions due to an interplay between the atomatom interaction and artificial gauge field. Also, we discover stable discrete solitons residing in a semi-infinite gap above the highest band, these discrete solitons are associated with the chiral edge currents.

We investigate the universal spatiotemporal dynamics in spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensates which are driven from the zero-momentum phase to the plane-wave phase. The excitation spectrum reveals that, at the critical point, the Landau critical velocity vanishes and the correlation length diverges. Therefore, according to the Kibble-Zurek mechanism, spatial domains will spontaneously appear in such a quench through the critical point. By simulating the real-time dynamics, we numerically extract the static correlation length critical exponent v and the dynamic critical exponent z from the scalings of the temporal bifurcation delay and the spatial domain number. The numerical scalings consist well with the analytical ones obtained by analyzing the excitation spectrum.

Dressed potentials realized by coupling state-dependent bare potentials with external fields have important applications in trapping and manipulating atoms. Here, we study the dynamics of dressed states for coupled two-component Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) in state-dependent potentials. Through both analytical and numerical methods, we find that the dressed state dynamics sensitively depend on both the inter-component coupling strength and the initial state. If the inter-component coupling is strong enough and the initial wave packet is located at the potential minimum, the dressed states can be decoupled and the Josephson oscillations and macroscopic quantum self-trapping appear. However, if the initial wave packet is located far away from the potential minimum, the wave packet will acquire a large kinetic energy and Landau-Zener transitiozs between the dressed states occur at the avoided-crossing point. Further, we give the validity ranges and conditions for the formation of adiabatic potentials, where the influences of Landau-Zener transitions can be ignored. Our results give an insight on how the inter-component coupling affects the dressed state dynamics and how to realize adiabatic potentials with BECs in state-dependent potentials.

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