Related papers: Measuring topological constraint relaxation in rin…
The measurement of interfacial mechanical or rheological properties in polymer blends is a challenging task, as well as providing a quantitative link between these properties and the interfacial nanostructure. Here, we perform a systematic…
Solutions of polymer chains are modelled using non-equilibrium Brownian dynamics simulations, with physically associative beads which form reversible crosslinks to establish a system-spanning physical gel network. Rheological properties…
Reversible crosslinking is a design paradigm for polymeric materials, wherein they are microscopically reinforced with chemical species that form transient crosslinks between the polymer chains. Besides the potential for self-healing,…
In this work a field theoretical model is constructed to describe the statistical mechanics of an arbitrary number of topologically linked polymers in the context of the analytical approach of Edwards. As an application, the effects of the…
Using molecular dynamics simulations we examine the dynamics of a family of model polymers with varying chain length and torsional potential barriers. We focus on features of the dynamics of polymers that are seen experimentally but absent…
In order to study rheological properties of gelling systems in dilute solution, we investigate the viscosity and the normal stresses in the Zimm model for randomly crosslinked monomers. The distribution of cluster topologies and sizes is…
The static and dynamic properties of ring polymers in concentrated solutions remains one of the last deep unsolved questions in Polymer Physics. At the same time, the nature of the glass transition in polymeric systems is also not well…
We present Monte Carlo computer simulations for melts of semiflexible randomly knotted and randomly concatenated ring polymers on the fcc lattice and in slit confinement. Through systematic variation of the slit width at fixed melt density,…
We present a new approach to study measures on ensembles of contours, polymers or other objects interacting by some sort of exclusion condition. For concreteness we develop it here for the case of Peierls contours. Unlike existing methods,…
We consider equilibrium relaxation properties of the end-to-end distance and of principal components in a one-dimensional polymer chain model with nonlinear interaction between the beads. While for the single-well potentials these…
It is nontrivial whether the average size of a ring polymer should become smaller or larger under a topological constraint. Making use of some knot invariants, we evaluate numerically the mean square radius of gyration for ring polymers…
We study properties of dilute polymer solutions which are known to depend strongly on polymer elongation. The probability density function (PDF) of polymer end-to-end extensions $R$ in turbulent flows is examined. We demonstrate that if the…
Linear polymers and other connected "line liquids" exhibit a coupling between density and equilibrium nematic order on the macroscopic level that gives rise to a Meyer-de Gennes vectorial conservation law. Nevertheless, isotropic linear…
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…
In polymer melts, the interaction between segments are considered to be screened and the ideal Gaussian chain statistics is recovered. The experimental fact that linear viscoelasticity of unentangled polymers can be well described by the…
Advances in controlled polymerization have enabled the synthesis of mechanically interlocked polymers like molecular knots and linear[n]catenane. These aesthetic macromolecules with unique topological constraints in the form of mechanical…
We consider the continuum limit of a recently-introduced model for discretized thick polymers, or tubes. We address both analytically and numerically how the polymer thickness influences the decay of tangent-tangent correlations and find…
We present molecular dynamics simulations on the structural relaxation of a simple bead-spring model for polymer blends. The introduction of a different monomer size induces a large time scale separation for the dynamics of the two…
We present a simple reaction kinetics model to describe the polymer synthesis used by Lusignan et al. (PRE, 60, 5657, 1999) to produce randomly branched polymers in the vulcanization class. Numerical solution of the rate equations gives…
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…