Related papers: A Topologically Driven Glass in Ring Polymers
Polymer-related materials exhibit rich glassy behaviors at different length scales due to their various molecular structures and topological constraints. Recent studies have identified transient interpenetration of the long-chain rings…
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…
Understanding how topological constraints affect the dynamics of polymers in solution is at the basis of any polymer theory and it is particularly needed for melts of rings. These polymers fold as crumpled and space-filling objects and,…
We present computer simulations of concentrated solutions of unknotted nonconcatenated semiflexible ring polymers. Unlike in their flexible counterparts, shrinking involves a strong energetic penalty, favoring interpenetration and…
The structural arrest of a polymeric suspension might be driven by an increase of the cross--linker concentration, that drives the gel transition, as well as by an increase of the polymer density, that induces a glass transition. These…
We study of the dynamics of ring polymers confined to diffuse in a background gel at low concentrations. We do this in order to probe the inter-play between topology and dynamics in ring polymers. We develop an algorithm that takes into…
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…
Ring polymers are characterized by topology-specific entanglements called threadings. In the limit of large rings, it is conjectured that a "topological glass" should emerge due to the proliferation of threadings. In this study, we used…
The effect of ring stiffness and pressure on the glassy dynamics of a thermal assembly of two-dimensional ring polymers is investigated using extensive coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations. In all cases, dynamical slowing down is…
Using extensive molecular dynamics simulations, we investigate the slowing down of dynamics in a 3D system of ring polymers by varying the ambient pressure and the stiffness of the rings. Our study demonstrates that the stiffness of the…
The glass transition is considered within two toys models, a mean field spin glass and a directed polymer in a correlated random potential. In the spin glass model there occurs a dynamical transition, where the system condenses in a state…
Theoretical challenges in understanding the nature of glass and the glass transition remain significant open questions in statistical and condensed matter physics. As a prototypical example of complex physical systems, glasses and the…
In the presented work we study, by means of numerical simulations, the behaviour of a suspension of active ring polymers in the bulk and under lateral confinement. When changing the separation between the confining planes and the polymers'…
Motivated by chromosomes enclosed in nucleus and the recently discovered active topological glass, we study a spherically confined melt of long nonconcatenated active polymer rings. Without activity, the rings exhibit the same average…
We investigate the dynamical response of glass-forming systems composed of topologically constrained ring polymers subjected to an instantaneous thermal quench, employing large-scale molecular dynamics simulations. We demonstrate that the…
We present a novel phenomenological theory describing how topological constraints in prime-knot ring polymers induce collective (cooperative) modes of motion. In low-complexity knots, chain segments can move quasi-independently. However, as…
The glass transition is a long-standing unsolved problem in materials science. For polymers, our understanding of glass-formation is particularly poor due to the added complexity of chain connectivity and flexibility; structural relaxation…
Performing light scattering experiments we show that introducing short-ranged attraction to a colloidal suspension of nearly hard spheres by addition of free polymer produces new glass transition phenomena. We observe a dramatic…
We use computer simulations to probe the thermodynamic and dynamic properties of a glass-former that undergoes an ideal glass-transition because of the presence of randomly pinned particles. We find that even deep in the equilibrium glass…
We re-examine the physical origin of the polymer glass transition from the point of view of marginal rigidity, which is achieved above a certain number of intermolecular contacts. In the case of polymer chains in a melt / poor solvent, each…