Related papers: Thermally Activated Processes in Polymer Glasses
We introduce a minimal theory of glass formation based on the ideas of molecular crowding and resultant string-like cooperative rearrangement, and address the effects of free interfaces. In the bulk case, we obtain a scaling expression for…
The principal theme of this paper is that anomalously slow, super-Arrhenius relaxations in glassy materials may be activated processes involving chains of molecular displacements. As pointed out in a preceding paper with A. Lemaitre, the…
We propose that the origin of the Vogel-Fulcher-Tammann law is the increase of the range of elastic interaction between local relaxation events in a liquid. In this picture, we discuss the origin of cooperativity of relaxation, the absence…
In a model of relativistic heavy ion collisions wherein the unconfined quark-gluon plasma is condensed into glass, we derive the Vogel-Fulcher-Tammann cooling law. This law is well known to hold true in condensed matter glasses. The high…
The glass transition temperature and its connection to statistical properties of confined and free-standing polymer films of varying thickness containing unentangled to highly entangled bead-spring chains are studied by molecular dynamics…
This paper reviews recent Monte Carlo simulation studies of the glassy behavior in thin polymer films. The simulations employ a version of the bond-fluctuation lattice model, in which the glass transition is driven by the competition…
Glass transition process gets affected in ultrathin films having thickness comparable to the size of the molecules. We observe systematic broadening of glass transition temperature (Tg) as the thickness of the polymer film reduces below the…
The $\alpha$-process (segmental motion) of thin polystyrene films supported on glass substrate has been investigated in a wider frequency range from 10$^{-3}$ Hz to 10$^4$ Hz using dielectric relaxation spectroscopy and thermal expansion…
We present Molecular Dynamics simulations of the thermal glass transition in a dense model polymer liquid. We performed a comparative study of both constant volume and constant pressure cooling of the polymer melt. Great emphasis was laid…
Motivated by recent experimental results on glassy polymer nanoparticles, we develop a minimal theoretical framework for the glass transition in spherical confinement. This is accomplished using our cooperative-string model for supercooled…
We investigate the dynamical response of glass-forming systems composed of topologically constrained ring polymers subjected to an instantaneous thermal quench, employing large-scale molecular dynamics simulations. We demonstrate that the…
Constitutive equations are derived for the viscoelastic response of rubbery polymers at finite strains. A polymer is thought of as a network of long chains connected to temporary junctions. At a random time, a chain detaches from a…
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…
Recent experiments have demonstrated that the glass transition temperature of thin polymer films can be shifted as compared to the same polymer in the bulk, the amplitude and the sign of this effect depending on the interaction between the…
We present results of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations for a non-entangled polymer melt confined between two completely smooth and repulsive walls, interacting with inner particles via the potential $U_{\rm wall}\myeq (\sigma/z)^9$,…
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…
We report on the crossover from the thermal to athermal regime of an artificial spin ice formed from a square array of magnetic islands whose lateral size, 30~nm~$\times$~70~nm, is small enough that they are superparamagnetic at room…
Starting with an expression, due originally to Einstein, for the shear viscosity \textit{$\eta $}(\textit{$\delta \phi $}) of a liquid having a small fraction \textit{$\delta \phi $}by volume of solid particulate matter suspended in it at…
We consider the thermally activated fragmentation of a homopolymer chain. In our simple model the dynamics of the intact chain is a Rouse one until a bond breaks and bond breakdown is considered as a first passage problem over a barrier to…
The dynamics of many glassy systems are known to exhibit string-like hopping motions each consisting of a line of particles displacing one and other. By using molecular dynamics simulations of glassy polymers, we show that these motions…