Related papers: Two Simple Approaches to Sol-Gel Transition
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…
Amorphous materials such as metallic, polymeric, and colloidal glasses, exhibit complex preparation-dependent mechanical response to applied shear. We perform numerical simulations to investigate the mechanical response of binary…
The mode-coupling theory of the glass transition treats the dynamics of supercooled liquids in terms of two-point density correlation functions. Here we consider a generalized, hierarchical formulation of schematic mode-coupling equations…
We investigate by means of molecular dynamics simulation a coarse-grained polymer glass model focusing on (quasi-static and dynamical) shear-stress fluctuations as a function of temperature T and sampling time $\Delta t$. The linear…
We investigate the dynamics of alginate gels, an important class of biopolymer-based viscoelastic materials, by combining mechanical tests and non-conventional, time-resolved light scattering methods. Two relaxation modes are observed upon…
The physical properties of blends of distinct homopolymers, cross-linked beyond the gelation point, are addressed via a Landau approach involving a pair of coupled order-parameter fields: one describing vulcanisation, the other describing…
We investigate the heterogeneous dynamics in a model, where chemical gelation and glass transition interplay, focusing on the dynamical susceptibility. Two independent mechanisms give raise to the correlations, which are manifested in the…
Dynamically crosslinked semiflexible biopolymers such as the actin cytoskeleton govern the mechanical behavior of living cells. Semiflexible biopolymers nonlinearly stiffen in response to mechanical loads, whereas the crosslinker dynamics…
The glass transition is a long-standing unsolved problem in materials science. For polymers, our understanding of glass-formation is particularly poor due to the added complexity of chain connectivity and flexibility; structural relaxation…
A spontaneous buckling transition in thin layers of monodomain nematic liquid crystalline gel was observed by polarized light microscopy. The coupling between the orientational ordering of liquid crystalline solvent and the translational…
We consider a gauge theory of the glass transition in the frustrated XY model being simplest model containing topologically nontrivial excitations. We describe the transition kinetics and find that the three-dimensional system exhibits the…
Glass-like materials are nonequilibrium systems where the relaxation time may exceed reasonable time scales of observations. In the present paper a dynamic percolation model is introduced in order to explain the principal properties of…
We briefly review the basics ideas and results of a recently proposed statistical mechanical approach to granular materials. Using lattice models from standard Statistical Mechanics and results from a mean field replica approach and Monte…
A simple and predictive model is put forward explaining the experimentally observed substantial shift of the glass transition temperature, Tg, of sufficiently thin polymer films. It focuses on the limit of small molecular weight, where…
Motivated by the structure of networks of cross-linked cytoskeletal biopolymers, we study the orientationally ordered phases in two-dimensional networks of randomly cross-linked semiflexible polymers. We consider permanent cross-links which…
A phenomenon recently coined as ``overaging'' implies a slowdown in the collective (slow) relaxation modes of a glass when a transient shear strain is imposed. We are able to reproduce this behavior in simulations of a supercooled polymer…
The relaxation of polymers around and below their glass transition temperature is governed by a range of correlated unit processes with a wide range of timescales. The fast deformation rates of shock loading can negate a significant…
Molecular dynamic simulation enables one to correlate the evolution of the micro-structure with anisotropic stress when a material is subject to strain. The anisotropic stress due to a constant strain-rate load in a cross-linked polymer is…
To study the cooling behavior and the glass transition of polymer melts in bulk and with free surfaces a coarse-grained weakly semi-flexible polymer model is developed. Based on a standard bead spring model with purely repulsive…
We study model near-critical polymer gelling systems made of gluten proteins dispersions stabilized at different distances from the gel point. We impose different shear rates and follow the time evolution of the stress. For sufficiently…