Related papers: Aging of living polymer networks: a model with pat…
Three series of tensile relaxation tests are performed on isotactic polypropylene at room temperature in the vicinity of the yield point. In the first series of experiments, injection-molded samples are used without thermal pre-treatment.…
We present an extensive computer simulation study of structure formation in amphiphilic block copolymer solutions after a quench from a homogeneous state. By using a mesoscopic field-based simulation method, we are able to access time…
It is often said that well-entangled and fast-breaking living polymers (such as wormlike micelles) exhibit a single relaxation time in their reptation dynamics, but the full story is somewhat more complicated. Understanding departures from…
Wormlike micellar solutions formed by long-chained zwitterionic surfactants show gel-like rheology at room temperature and have recently been found to exhibit other complex and interesting rheological features. We study the dynamics of…
Surface tension-driven flow techniques have recently emerged as an efficient means of shedding light into the rheology of thin polymer films. Motivated by experimental and theoretical approaches in films bearing a varying surface…
The dynamic response of prestressed semiflexible biopolymers is characterized by the propagation and relaxation of tension, which arises due to the near inextensibility of a stiff backbone. It is coupled to the dynamics of contour length…
The shear-thickening behaviour of wormlike micelles, at concentrations just below overlap, remains unexplained. In some cases it has recently been confirmed that very slow relaxations must be present even in the quiescent state -- for…
Models of active nematics in biological systems normally require complexity arising from the hydrodynamics involved at the microscopic level as well as the viscoelastic nature of the system. Here we show that a minimal, space-independent,…
We perform micro-rheological experiments with a colloidal bead driven through a viscoelastic worm-like micellar fluid and observe two distinctive shear thinning regimes, each of them displaying a Newtonian-like plateau. The shear thinning…
The concept of a `persistent worm' is introduced, representing the smallest possible length of a wormlike micelle, and modelled by a bead-spring chain with sticky beads at the ends. Persistent worms are allowed to combine with each other at…
High-frequency (up to ${\omega} = 6 \, 10^4$ rad/s) rheological measurements combined with light-scattering investigations show that an isotropic and multiconnected phase of surfactant micelles exhibits a terminal relaxation time of a few…
Phase separation has recently emerged as an important organizational principle in the dense and heterogeneous environment within living cells. Here, we use a synthetic system to show that compressive stresses in a polymer network suppress…
The extensive application of surfactants motivates comprehensive and predictive theoretical studies that improve our understanding of the behaviour of these complex systems. In this study, an expression for the elastic free-energy density…
Physical aging in polymers is a fundamental yet poorly understood phenomenon, as diverse macromolecular systems exhibit remarkably similar slow dynamics. Through molecular dynamics simulations of physically crosslinked networks composed of…
We present a novel simulation technique derived from Brownian cluster dynamics used so far to study the isotropic colloidal aggregation. It now implements the classical Kern-Frenkel potential to describe patchy interactions between…
Like emulsions, pastes and many other forms of soft condensed matter, aqueous foams present slow mechanical relaxations when subjected to a stress too small to induce any plastic flow. To identify the physical origin of this viscoelastic…
Several surfactant molecules self-assemble in solution to form long, cylindrical, flexible wormlike micelles. These micelles can be entangled with each other leading to viscoelastic phases. The rheological properties of such phases are very…
Experiments performed in the last years demonstrated slow relaxations and aging in the conductance of a large variety of materials. Here, we present experimental and theoretical results for conductance relaxation and aging for the…
To understand the non-equilibrium relaxation dynamics of a liquid droplet on a switchable substrate the interplay of different length- and time-scales needs to be understood. We present a method to map the microscopic information, resulting…
Microgels are elastic and deformable particles with a hybrid nature between that of polymers and colloids and unconventional behaviours with respect to hard colloids. We investigated the dynamics of a soft microgel made of interpenetrated…