Related papers: Are polymer melts "ideal"?
Presenting theoretical arguments and numerical results we demonstrate long-range intrachain correlations in concentrated solutions and melts of long flexible polymers which cause a systematic swelling of short chain segments. They can be…
The scaling of the bond-bond correlation function $C(s)$ along linear polymer chains is investigated with respect to the curvilinear distance, $s$, along the flexible chain and the monomer density, $\rho$, via Monte Carlo and molecular…
Angular correlations in dense solutions and melts of flexible polymer chains are investigated with respect to the distance $r$ between the bonds by comparing quantitative predictions of perturbation calculations with numerical data obtained…
It has been assumed until very recently that all long-range correlations are screened in three-dimensional melts of linear homopolymers on distances beyond the correlation length $\xi$ characterizing the decay of the density fluctuations.…
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…
We examine entanglements using monomer contacts between pairs of chains in a Brownian-dynamics simulation of a polymer melt. A map of contact positions with respect to the contacting monomer numbers (i,j) shows clustering in small regions…
We present a detailed study of the static and dynamic behavior of long semiflexible polymer chains in a melt. Starting from previously obtained fully equilibrated high molecular weight polymer melts [{\it Zhang et al.} ACS Macro Lett. 3,…
By Monte Carlo simulations of a variant of the bond-fluctuation model without topological constraints we examine the center-of-mass (COM) dynamics of polymer melts in $d=3$ dimensions. Our analysis focuses on the COM displacement…
In polymer physics it is typically assumed that excluded volume interactions are effectively screened in polymer melts. Hence, chains could be described by an effective random walk without excluded volume interactions. In this letter, we…
Self-avoiding polymers in strictly two-dimensional ($d=2$) melts are investigated by means of molecular dynamics simulation of a standard bead-spring model with chain lengths ranging up to N=2048. % The chains adopt compact configurations…
A cornerstone of modern polymer physics is the `Flory ideality hypothesis' which states that a chain in a polymer melt adopts `ideal' random-walk-like conformations. Here we revisit theoretically and numerically this pivotal assumption and…
Collapse of the polymer chain upon the sharp decrease of solvent quality is studied. During collapse, any pair of polymer units appearing in a sufficiently close vicinity in space has the possibility with a certain probability to form an…
Conformation-dependent design of polymer sequences can be considered as a tool to control macromolecular self-assembly. We consider the monomer unit sequences created via the modification of polymers in a homogeneous melt in accordance with…
Following the Flory ideality hypothesis intrachain and interchain excluded volume interactions are supposed to compensate each other in dense polymer systems. Multi-chain effects should thus be neglected and polymer conformations may be…
We investigate mutual local chain order in systems of fully flexible polymer melts in a simple generic bead-spring model. The excluded-volume interaction together with the connectivity leads to local ordering effects which are independent…
The rapid collapse of a polymer, due to external forces or changes in solvent, yields a long-lived `crumpled globule.' The conjectured fractal structure shaped by hierarchical collapse dynamics has proved difficult to establish, even with…
Following Flory's ideality hypothesis the chemical potential of a test chain of length $n$ immersed into a dense solution of chemically identical polymers of length distribution P(N) is extensive in $n$. We argue that an additional…
Equilibration of polymer melts containing highly entangled long polymer chains in confinement or with free surfaces is a challenge for computer simulations. We approach this problem by first studying polymer melts based on the soft-sphere…
We investigate the kinetics of a polymer collapse due to the formation of irreversible crosslinks between its monomers. Using the contact probability $P(s)$ as a scale-dependent order parameter depending on the chemical distance $s$, our…
The classical bond-fluctuation model (BFM) is an efficient lattice Monte Carlo algorithm for coarse-grained polymer chains where each monomer occupies exclusively a certain number of lattice sites. In this paper we propose a generalization…