Related papers: Olympic Gels: Concatenation and Swelling
The bond fluctuation method is used to simulate both non-concatenated entangled and interpenetrating melts of ring polymers. We find that the swelling of interpenetrating rings upon dilution follows the same laws as for linear chains.…
Monte Carlo computer simulations are used to study the segregation behaviour of two polymers under cylindrical confinement. Using a multiple-histogram method, the conformational free energy, F, of the polymers was measured as a function of…
We perform molecular-dynamics simulations for polymer melts of the coarse-grained polyvinyl alcohol model that crystallizes upon slow cooling. To establish the properties of its high temperature liquid state as a reference point, we…
Monte Carlo simulations are used to study the behavior of two polymers under confinement in a cylindrical tube. Each polymer is modeled as a chain of hard spheres. We measure the free energy of the system, F, as a function of the distance…
We present a detailed account of a recently proposed phenomenological theory for noncatenated ring polymer melts (Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 167802 (2011)). A basic assumption lies in the implementation of the noncatenation constraint via the…
We present further evidence that gelation is an arrested phase separation in attractive colloid-polymer mixtures, based on a method combining confocal microscopy experiments with numerical simulations recently established in {\bf Nature…
In this thesis the formation and properties of a polymer gel on and at a surface are investigated. The gel under investigation is defined as a three-dimensional network of "phantom" macromolecules that form permanent links with one another…
It is commonly accepted that in concentrated solutions or melts high-molecular weight polymers display random-walk conformational properties without long-range correlations between subsequent bonds. This absence of memory means, for…
We present a study on the melting dynamics of neighbouring ice bodies by means of idealised simulations, focusing on collective effects, with the goal of obtaining fundamental insight into how collective interactions influence the melting…
While the structure of chromatin has been studied in great detail on length scales below 30 nm, amazingly little is known about the higher-order folding motifs of chromatin in interphase. Recent experiments give evidence that the folding…
We generalize a recently investigated lattice model of semiflexible polymers formed under equilibrium polymerization in a solution and conduct a comprehensive investigation of its melting properties. The model is characterized by six…
Molecular dynamics simulations were conducted to investigate the dynamic properties of melts of nonconcatenated ring polymers and compared to melts of linear polymers. The longest rings were composed of N=1600 monomers per chain which…
We study the effects of charge-regulated acid/base equilibrium on the swelling of polyelectrolyte gels, by considering a combination of the Poisson-Boltzmann theory and a two-site charge-regulation model based on the Langmuir adsorption…
The crystallisation of entangled polymers from their melt is investigated using computer simulation with a coarse-grained model. Using hybrid Monte Carlo simulations enables us to probe the behaviour of long polymer chains. We identify…
The size of rings (also called cyclic polymers) in bidisperse blends of chemically identical rings is analyzed by computer simulations. Data of entangled ring blends and blends of interpenetrating rings are compared and it is shown that the…
Hybrid molecular dynamics/Monte Carlo simulations used to study melts of unentangled, thermoreversibly associating supramolecular polymers. In this first of a series of papers, we describe and validate a model that is effective in…
We study structural properties of a ring polymeric melt confined in a film in comparison to a linear counterpart using molecular dynamics simulations. Local structure orderings of ring and linear polymers in the vicinity of the surface are…
The competition between the connectivity and the local or global order in model fully-flexible chain molecules is investigated by molecular-dynamics simulations. States with both missing (melts) and high (crystal) global order are…
Nobel metals that are deposited on a polymer surface exhibit surface diffusion and diffusion into the bulk. At the same time the metal atoms tend to form clusters because their cohesive energy is about two orders of magnitude higher than…
The dynamics of polymer melts at the crossover between unentagled and entangled regimes is formalized here through an extension of the Cooperative Dynamics Generalized Langevin Equation (CDGLE) (\textit{J. Chem. Phys.} 110,7574 (1999)), by…