Related papers: Why polymer chains in a melt are not random walks
Unconcatenated, unknotted polymer rings in the melt are subject to strong interactions with neighboring chains due to the presence of topological constraints. We study this by computer simulation using the bond-fluctuation algorithm for…
We extend the Weak Crystallization theory to the case of metallic alloys. The additional ingredient -- itinerant electrons -- generates nontrivial dependence of free energy on the angles between ordering wave vectors of ionic density. That…
The stretching of a polymer chain by a large scale chaotic flow is considered. The steady state which emerges as a balance of the turbulent stretching and anharmonic resistance of the chain is quantitatively described, i.e. the dependency…
The conformational statistics of ring polymers in melts or dense solutions is strongly affected by their quenched microscopic topological state. The effect is particularly strong for non-concatenated unknotted rings, which are known to…
The density crossover scaling of various thermodynamic properties of solutions and melts of self-avoiding and highly flexible polymer chains without chain intersections confined to strictly two dimensions is investigated by means of…
We study the configurational properties of single polymers in a theta solvent by Monte Carlo simulation of the bond fluctuation model. The intramolecular structure factor at the theta point is found to be distinctively different from that…
Recent step strain experiments in well-entangled polymeric liquids demonstrated a bulk fracture-like phenomenon. We have studied this instability using a modern version of the Doi-Edwards theory for entangled polymers, and we find close…
When the local intrinsic stiffness of a polymer chain varies over a wide range, one can observe both a crossover from rigid-rod-like behavior to (almost) Gaussian random coils and a further crossover towards self-avoiding walks in good…
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. This…
A key assumption of polymer physics is that the random chains polymers extend in flow. Recent experimental evidence has shown that polymer chains compress in Couette flow in a manner counter to expectation. Here, scaling arguments developed…
The nematic ordering in semiflexible polymers with contour length $L$ exceeding their persistence length $\ell_p$ is described by a confinement of the polymers in a cylinder of radius $r_{eff}$ much larger than the radius $r_\rho$, expected…
Confinement is a versatile and well-established tool to study the properties of polymers either to understand biological processes or to develop new nano-biomaterials. We investigate the conformations of a semiflexible polymer ring in weak…
A ring polymer is a random walk whose steps obey a single linear condition; their sum vanishes. Factoring the graph Laplacian into the product of the incidence matrix and its transpose allows us to show that for a more complicated network,…
Using molecular dynamics simulations of a tangent-soft-sphere bead-spring polymer model, we examine the degree to which semiflexible polymer melts solidify at isostaticity. Flexible and stiff chains crystallize when they are isostatic as…
We present a Bethe approximation to study lattice models of linear polymers. The approach is variational in nature and based on the cluster variation method (CVM). We focus on a model with $(i)$ a nearest neighbor attractive energy…
We study a single flexible chain molecule grafted to a membrane which has pores of size slightly larger than the monomer size. On both sides of the membrane there is the same solvent. When this solvent is good, i.e. when the polymer is…
We systematically explore the self-assembly of semi-flexible polymers in deformable spherical confinement across a wide regime of chain stiffness, contour lengths and packing fractions by means of coarse-grained molecular dynamics…
In a recently developed theory of the atomic motion in monatomic liquids, the motion is comprised of normal mode vibrations in any of the large number of equivalent random valleys, interspersed with nearly instantaneous transits which carry…
It has long been conjectured that (rapid) fracture propagation dynamics in materials and turbulent motion of fluids are two manifestations of the same physical process. The universality class of turbulence (Kolmogorov dispersion in…
Polymer fibers consist of macromolecules oriented along the fiber axis. Better alignment of chains leads to an increased strength of the fiber. It is believed that the key factor preventing formation of a perfectly oriented fiber is…