Related papers: Elastic response of poly(ethylene glycol) polymer …
Within the cell, biopolymers are often situated in constrained, fluid environments, e.g., cytoskeletal networks, stretched DNAs in chromatin. It is of paramount importance to understand quantitatively how they, utilizing their flexibility,…
It has been recently observed that synthetic materials subjected to an external elastic stress give rise to scaling phenomena in the acoustic emission signal. Motivated by this experimental finding we develop a mesoscopic model in order to…
We address the general question of how the molecular weight dependence of chain dynamics in unentangled polymers is modified by blending. By dielectric spectroscopy we measure the normal mode relaxation of polyisoprene in blends with a slow…
The time-dependent transverse response of stiff polymers, represented as weakly-bending wormlike chains (WLCs), is well-understood on the linear level, where transverse degrees of freedom evolve independently from the longitudinal ones. We…
The elastic response in polymeric gels is studied by means of a percolation dynamic model. By numerical simulations the fluctuations in the gyration radius and in the center of mass motion of the percolating cluster are determined. Their…
Observations are reported on isotactic polypropylene (i) in a series of tensile tests with a constant strain rate on specimens annealed for 24 h at various temperatures in the range from 110 to 150 C and (ii) in two series of creep tests in…
We present a new apparatus that probes simultaneously the macroscopic mechanical response and the microscopic motion in polymer networks under uni-axial strain. The setup leverages photon correlation imaging, a space- and time-resolved…
Polymers in nonuniform flows undergo strong deformation, which in the presence of persistent stretching can result in the coil-stretch transition. This phenomenon has been characterized by using the formalism of nonequilibrium statistical…
We present a set of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of strongly charged, flexible polyelectrolyte chains under poor solvent conditions in a salt free solution. Structural properties of the chains and of the solutions are reported. By…
We explore the transport features of a single flexible polymer chain that walks on a periodic ratchet potential coupled with spatially varying temperature. At steady state the polymer exhibits a fast unidirectional motion where the…
We have developed a new technique to measure viscoelasticity in soft materials such as polymer solutions, by monitoring thermal fluctuations of embedded probe particles using laser interferometry in a microscope. Interferometry allows us to…
Constitutive modeling of dielectric elastomers has been of long standing interest in mechanics. Over the last two decades rigorous constitutive models have been developed that couple the electrical response of these polymers with large…
We investigate the mechanical properties of amorphous polymers by means of coarse-grained simulations and nonaffine lattice dynamics theory. A small increase of polymer chain bending stiffness leads first to softening of the material, while…
We develop topological methods for characterizing the relationship between polymer chain entanglement and bulk viscoelastic responses. We introduce generalized Linking Number and Writhe characteristics that are applicable to open linear…
We investigate the emergence of isotropic linear elasticity in amorphous and polycrystalline solids, via extensive numerical simulations. We show that the elastic properties are correlated over a finite length scale $\xi_E$, so that the…
We exploited the high temporal and spatial resolution of neutron spin echo spectroscopy to investigate the large-scale dynamics of semiflexible conjugated polymer chains in solutions. We obtained the first experimental demonstration of…
We revisit a model of semiflexible Gaussian chains proposed by Winkler \textit{et al}, solve the dynamics of the discrete description of the model and derive exact algebraic expressions for some of the most relevant dynamical observables,…
Parametric instabilities are a known feature of periodically driven dynamic systems; at particular frequencies and amplitudes of the driving modulation, the system's quasi-periodic response undergoes a frequency lock-in, leading to a…
The dynamics of elongated inertial particles in an extensional flow is studied numerically by performing simulations of freely jointed bead-rod chains. The coil-stretch transition and the tumbling instability are characterized as a function…
We review the physical properties of macromolecular networks, consisting of semiflexible polymers such as actin. We start by giving a theoretical analysis of the conformational statistics and mechanical response of single filaments.…