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Polydispersity is inevitable in industrially produced polymers. Established theories of polymer dynamics and rheology, however, were mostly built on monodisperse linear polymers. Dynamics of polydisperse polymers is yet to be fully explored…
During the life cycle of bacterial cells the non-mixing of the two ring-shaped daughter genomes is an important prerequisite for the cell division process. Mimicking the environments inside highly crowded biological cells, we study the…
This study investigates the probability of threading in star catenanes under good solvent conditions using molecular dynamics simulations, emphasizing the influence of ring rigidity. Threading in these systems arises from the interplay…
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…
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…
The non-linear response of entangled polymers to shear flow is complicated. Its current understanding is framed mainly as a rheological description in terms of the complex viscosity. However, the full picture requires an assessment of the…
We study stress relaxation in bi-disperse entangled polymer solutions. Shorter chains embedded in a majority of longer ones are known to be oriented by coupling to them. We analyze the mechanism for this both by computer simulation and…
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 non-concatenated unknotted rings, which are known to…
While nearly all theoretical and computational studies of entangled polymer melts have focused on uniform samples, polymer synthesis routes always result in some dispersity, albeit narrow, of distribution of molecular weights (D_M=M_w/M_n ~…
We investigate the ejection dynamics of a ring polymer out of a cylindrical nanochannel using both theoretical analysis and three dimensional Langevin dynamics simulations. The ejection dynamics for ring polymers shows two regimes like for…
Synthetic polymers have a distribution of chain lengths which can be characterized by dispersity, D. Macroscopic properties of polymers are influenced by chain mobility in the melt and manipulating D can significantly impact these…
The influence of an external flow on the relaxation dynamics of a single polymer is investigated theoretically and numerically. We show that a pronounced dynamical slowdown occurs in the vicinity of the coil-stretch transition, especially…
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…
Dynamical properties of a long polymer ring in a melt of unknotted and unconcatenated rings are calculated. We re-examine and generalize the well known model of a ring confined to a lattice of topological obstacles in the light of the…
Based on a coarse-grained model, we carry out molecular dynamics simulations to analyze the diffusion of a small tracer particle inside a cylindrical channel whose inner wall is covered with randomly grafted short polymeric chains. We…
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 investigate with numerical simulations the molecular origin of viscosity in melts of flexible and semiflexible oligomer rings in comparison to corresponding systems with linear chains. The strong increase of viscosity with ring stiffness…
Ring, or cyclic, polymers have unique properties compared to linear polymers, due to their topologically closed structure that has no beginning or end. Experimental measurements on molecular ring polymers are challenging due to their…
We use molecular dynamics simulations to investigate the tracer diffusion in a sea of polymers with specific binding zones for the tracer. These binding zones act as traps. Our simulations show that the tracer can undergo normal yet…
We examine the jamming transition in a two-dimensional granular polymer system using compressional simulations. The jamming density \phi_c decreases with increasing length of the granular chain due to the formation of loop structures, in…