Related papers: Ring polymers in melts and solutions: scaling and …
A Flory theory is constructed for a long polymer ring in a melt of unknotted and non-concatenated rings. The theory assumes that the ring forms an effective annealed branched object and computes its primitive path. It is shown that the…
We perform molecular-dynamics simulations for polymer melts of the coarse-grained polyvinyl alcohol model that crystallizes upon slow cooling. To establish the properties of its high temperature liquid state as a reference point, we…
In the first part of this work a summary is provided of some recent experiments and theoretical results which are relevant in the research of systems of polymer rings in nontrivial topological conformations. Next, some advances in modeling…
The conformational statistics of ring polymers in melts or dense solutions is strongly affected by their quenched microscopic topological state. The effect is particularly strong for untangled (i.e. non-concatenated and unknotted) rings,…
Polymers in a melt may be subject to topological constraints, as in the example of unlinked polymer rings. How to do statistical mechanics in the presence of such constraints remains a fundamental open problem. We study the effect of…
We study the scaling limit of a fully packed loop model in two dimensions, where the loops are endowed with a bending rigidity. The scaling limit is described by a three-parameter family of conformal field theories, which we characterize…
We argue that the phase transition in the mean-field XY model is related to a particular change in the topology of its configuration space. The nature of this topological transition can be discussed on the basis of elementary Morse theory…
Molecular dynamics simulations confirm recent extensional flow experiments showing ring polymer melts exhibit strong extension-rate thickening of the viscosity at Weissenberg numbers $Wi<<1$. Thickening coincides with the extreme elongation…
Via large-scale molecular dynamics simulations, we observe the melting of a topological glass of stiff ring polymers by incorporating flexible ring polymers, along an isobaric path. As more flexible ring polymers are introduced, cluster…
We study random tiling models in the limit of high rotational symmetry. In this limit a mean-field theory yields reasonable predictions for the configurational entropy of free boundary rhombus tilings in two dimensions. We base our…
We study pressurised self-avoiding ring polymers in two dimensions using Monte Carlo simulations, scaling arguments and Flory-type theories, through models which generalise the model of Leibler, Singh and Fisher [Phys. Rev. Lett. Vol. 59,…
Elucidating the physics of a concentrated suspension of ring polymers, or of an ensemble of ring polymers in a complex environment, is an important outstanding question in polymer physics. Many of the characteristic features of these…
We extend classical Flory-Rehner theory for the expansion and compression of porous materials such as cross-linked polymer networks. The theory includes volume exclusion, affinity with the solvent, and finite stretching of the polymer…
Polymers are an effective test-bed for studying topological constraints in condensed matter due to a wide array of synthetically-available chain topologies. When linear and ring polymers are blended together, emergent rheological properties…
The field theory approach to the statistical mechanics of a system of N polymer rings linked together is generalized to the case of links that have a fixed number $2s$ of maxima and minima. Such kind of links are called plats and appear for…
The viscous flow of polymer chains in dense melts is dominated by topological constraints whenever the single chain contour length, N, becomes larger than the characteristic scale Ne, defining comprehensively the macroscopic rheological…
In recent times some interesting field theoretical descriptions of the statistical mechanics of entangling polymers have been proposed by various authors. In these approaches, a single test polymer fluctuating in a background of static…
Many glass-forming fluids exhibit a remarkable thermodynamic scaling in which dynamic properties, such as the viscosity, the relaxation time, and the diffusion constant, can be described under different thermodynamic conditions in terms of…
We have mapped the physics of polymer melts onto a time-dependent Landau-Ginzburg $|\psi|^4$ field theory using techniques of functional integration. Time in the theory is simply a label for the location of a given monomer along the extent…
A collection of rigorous results for a class of mean-field monomer-dimer models is presented. It includes a Gaussian representation for the partition function that is shown to considerably simplify the proofs. The solutions of the quenched…