Related papers: Super-stretchable Elastomer from Cross-linked Ring…
The relationship between polymer topology and bulk rheology remains a key question in soft matter physics. Architecture-specific constraints (or threadings) are thought to control the dynamics of ring polymers in ring-linear blends, which…
Packings of macroscopic granular chains capture some of the essential aspects of molecular polymer systems and have been suggested as a paradigm to understand the physics on a molecular scale. However, here we demonstrate that the…
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…
We introduce an entropic network model for copolymer elastomers based on the evolution of microscopic chain conformations during deformation. We show that the stress results from additive contributions due to chain stretch at the global as…
The shape of semiflexible polymer rings is studied over their whole range of flexibility. Investigating the joint distribution of asphericity and nature of asphericity as well as their respective averages we find two distinct shape regimes…
Polymer-related materials exhibit rich glassy behaviors at different length scales due to their various molecular structures and topological constraints. Recent studies have identified transient interpenetration of the long-chain rings…
In many industrial processes, pieces of the same polymer material are brought into contact at a temperature above the glass transition. Interdiffusion then takes place across the interface and leads to a strengthening of the junction.…
Behavior of a dilute polymer solution in a random three-dimensional flow with an average shear is studied experimentally. Polymer contribution to the shear stress is found to be more than two orders of magnitude higher than in a laminar…
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…
Star polymers are within the most topologically entangled macromolecules. For a star to move the current theory is that one arm must retract to the branch point. The probability of this event falls exponentially with molecular weight, and a…
The effects of entanglement in solutions and melts of unknotted ring polymers have been addressed by several theoretical and numerical studies. The system properties have been typically profiled as a function of ring contour length at fixed…
The extension elasticity of rod-coil mutliblock copolymers is analyzed for two experimentally accessible situations. In the quenched case, when the architecture is fixed by the synthesis, the force law is distinguished by a sharp change in…
We study the effects of intrinsic sequence-dependent curvature for a two dimensional semiflexible biopolymer with short-range correlation in intrinsic curvatures. We show exactly that when not subjected to any external force, such a system…
Solutions of semiflexible polymers confined by repulsive planar walls are studied by density functional theory and Molecular Dynamics simulations, to clarify the competition between the chain alignment favored by the wall and the depletion…
Ferrogels and magnetic elastomers differentiate themselves from other materials by their unique capability of reversibly changing shape and mechanical properties under the influence of an external magnetic field. A crucial issue in the…
We study theoretically the entropic elasticity of a semi-flexible polymer, such as DNA, confined to two dimensions. Using the worm-like-chain model we obtain an exact analytical expression for the partition function of the polymer pulled at…
Polymer gels with photo-responsive cross-links enable tunable mechanics and surface morphologies, making them promising for adaptive materials. While prior work on coumarin cross-linked gels has focused on photo-mediated events in dilute…
We consider polymers in which M randomly selected pairs of monomers are restricted to be in contact. Analytical arguments and numerical simulations show that an ideal (Gaussian) chain of N monomers remains expanded as long as M<<N; its mean…
Disordered networks of semiflexible filaments are common support structures in biology. Familiar examples include fibrous matrices in blood clots, bacterial biofilms, and essential components of cells and tissues of plants, animals, and…
Polymeric single-chain nanoparticles (SCNPs) are soft nano-objects synthesized by purely intramolecular cross-linking of single polymer chains. By means of computer simulations, we investigate the conformational properties of SCNPs as a…