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The rheological behavior of ring-linear polymer blends under uniaxial elongational flow has remained a subject of intense debate, particularly regarding the emergence of stress overshoot. Herein, we employ coarse-grained molecular dynamics…
We apply monomer-resolved computer simulations of supercoiled ring polymers under shear, taking full account of the hydrodynamic interactions, accompanied, in parallel, by simulations in which these are switched off. The combination of…
Reptation theory has been highly successful in explaining the unusual material properties of entangled polymer solutions. It reduces the complex many-body dynamics to a single-polymer description where each polymer is envisaged to be…
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…
Constitutive equations are derived for the viscoelastic response of rubbery polymers at finite strains. A polymer is thought of as a network of long chains connected to temporary junctions. At a random time, a chain detaches from a…
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…
The work in this article is inspired by a classical problem: the statistical physical properties of a closed polymer loop that is wound around a rod. Historically the preserved topology of this system has been addressed through…
We discuss the entropy of a circular polymer under a topological constraint. We call it the {\it topological entropy} of the polymer, in short. A ring polymer does not change its topology (knot type) under any thermal fluctuations. Through…
The statistical mechanics of a long knotted collapsed polymer is determined by a free-energy with a knot-dependent subleading term, which is linked to the length of the shortest polymer that can hold such knot. The only other parameter…
We study the rotational dynamics of a flexible polymer initially wrapped around a rigid rod and unwinding from it. This dynamics is of interest in several problems in biology and constitutes a fundamental instance of polymer relaxation from…
We present simulations on a binary blend of bead-spring polymer chains. The introduction of monomer size disparity yields very different relaxation times for each component of the blend. Competition between two different arrest mechanisms,…
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…
Thermosensitive microgels are widely studied hybrid systems combining properties of polymers and colloidal particles in a unique way. Due to their complex morphology their interactions and packing, and consequentially the viscoelastcity of…
Macrochains of topologically interlocked rings with unique physical properties have recently gained considerable interest in supramolecular chemistry, biology, and soft matter. Most of the work has been, so far, focused on linear chains and…
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…
Understanding how polymer topology influences melt extrudability is critical for advancing material design in extrusion-based additive manufacturing. In this work, we develop a bottom-up, cross-scale modeling framework that integrates…
The role of polymers additives on the turbulent convective flow of a Rayleigh--Taylor system is investigated by means of direct numerical simulations (DNS) of Oldroyd-B viscoelastic model. The dynamics of polymers elongation follow…
Topological constraints can affect both equilibrium and dynamic properties of polymer systems, and can play a role in the organization of chromosomes. Despite many theoretical studies, the effects of topological constraints on the…
The ability to tune the microstructures formed by block copolymers using accessible physical approaches provides control for practical material applications. A common strategy involves the addition of homopolymers, which can induce…
We investigate theoretically the effect of polymer tension on the collective behavior of reversibly binding cross-links. For this purpose, we employ a model of two weakly bending wormlike chains aligned in parallel by a tensile force, with…