Related papers: A Topologically Driven Glass in Ring Polymers
In this talk, after a short phenomenological introduction on glasses, I will describe some recent progresses that have been done in glasses using the replica method in the definition and in the evaluation of the configurational entropy (or…
Semi-flexible polymers in crowded environments exhibit complex dynamics that play a crucial role in various biological and material design processes. Based on the classic reptation theory, it is generally believed that semiflexible polymers…
Extending mode-coupling theory, we elaborate a microscopic theory for the glass transition of liquids confined between two parallel flat hard walls. The theory contains the standard MCT equations in bulk and in two dimensions as limiting…
In this work we use molecular simulations to examine methods of controlling mechanical properties of polymeric glass materials such as elastic moduli, mechanical heterogeneity as well as their glass transition temperature. We study filled…
To study the cooling behavior and the glass transition of polymer melts in bulk and with free surfaces a coarse-grained weakly semi-flexible polymer model is developed. Based on a standard bead spring model with purely repulsive…
We numerically investigate and experimentally demonstrate an in-situ topological band transition in a highly tunable mechanical system made of cylindrical granular particles. This system allows us to tune its inter-particle stiffness in a…
Due to its non-crystalline nature, the glassy state has remained one the most exciting scientific challenges. To study such materials, Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations have been extensively used because they provide a direct view into…
A simple and predictive model is put forward explaining the experimentally observed substantial shift of the glass transition temperature, Tg, of sufficiently thin polymer films. It focuses on the limit of small molecular weight, where…
We perform computer simulations of mechanically linked (poly[2]catenanes, PC) and chemically bonded (bonded rings, BR) pairs of self-avoiding ring polymers in steady shear. We find that BR's develop a novel motif, termed gradient tumbling,…
The topological interaction arising in interlinked polymeric rings such as DNA catenanes is considered. More specifically, the free energy for a pair of linked random walk rings is derived where the distance $R$ between two segments each of…
We study a colloidal suspension confined between two quasi-parallel walls as a model system for glass transitions in confined geometries. The suspension is a mixture of two particle sizes to prevent wall-induced crystallization. We use…
The number of compact structures of a single condensed polymer (SCP), with similar free energies, grows exponentially with the degree of polymerization. In analogy with structural glasses (SGs), we expect that at low temperatures chain…
Polymer self-adhesion due to the interdiffusion of macromolecules has been an active area of research for several decades [70, 43, 62, 42, 72, 73, 41]. Here, we report a new phenomenon of sub-Tg, solid-state, plasticity-induced bonding;…
We provide a theoretical perspective on the glass transition in molecular liquids at thermal equilibrium, on the spatially heterogeneous and aging dynamics of disordered materials, and on the rheology of soft glassy materials. We start with…
It has been shown that under high cylindrical confinement, two ring polymers with excluded volume interactions between monomers, segregate to two halves of the cylinder to maximize their entropy. In contrast, two ring polymers remain mixed…
The wrapping equilibria of one and two adsorbing cylinders are studied along a semi-flexible filament (polymer) due to the interplay between elastic rigidity and short-range adhesive energy between the cylinder and the filament. We show…
Bonding between polymeric interfaces is encountered widely in several industrial applications. Many of these bonding processes rely on time-consuming and temperature-dependent classical mechanism of polymer interdiffusion via reptation in a…
In 1995, the Nobel Price winner P.W. Anderson made the following remarkable statement: The deepest and most interesting unsolved problem in solid state theory is probably the theory of the nature of glass and glass transition. Although…
Glass transition where viscosity of liquids increases dramatically upon decrease of temperature without any major change in structural properties, remains one of the most challenging problems in condensed matter physics (Cavagna, 2009;…
This paper reviews recent Monte Carlo simulation studies of the glassy behavior in thin polymer films. The simulations employ a version of the bond-fluctuation lattice model, in which the glass transition is driven by the competition…