Related papers: Crystallization of a polymer on a surface
In this paper I describe the computer simulations that I have performed to critically examine the Lauritzen-Hoffman and the Sadler-Gilmer theories of polymer crystallization. In particular, I have computed the free energy profile for…
Kinetic barriers cause polymers to crystallize incompletely, into nanoscale lamellae interleaved with amorphous regions. As a result, crystalline polymers are full of crystal-melt interfaces, which dominate their physical properties. The…
We report Monte Carlo simulations of the melting of a single-polymer crystallite. We find that, unlike most atomic and molecular crystals, such crystallites can be heated appreciably above their melting temperature before they transform to…
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…
The crystallisation of entangled polymers from their melt is investigated using computer simulation with a coarse-grained model. Using hybrid Monte Carlo simulations enables us to probe the behaviour of long polymer chains. We identify…
Polymorphism rationalizes how processing can control the final structure of a material. The rugged free-energy landscape and exceedingly slow kinetics in the solid state have so far hampered computational investigations. We report for the…
A common approach to study nucleation rates is the estimation of free-energy barriers. This usually requires knowledge about the shape of the forming droplet, a task that becomes notoriously difficult in macromolecular setups starting with…
In this paper, we report dynamic Monte Carlo simulations of melting and crystallization in a single-chain system. Their free energy barriers are calculated by the umbrella sampling method and can be described well by a simple expression…
We present a kinetic model of crystal growth of polymers of finite molecular weight. Experiments help to classify polymer crystallization broadly into two kinetic regimes. One is observed in melts or in high molar mass polymer solutions and…
We investigate the kinetics and the free energy landscape of the crystallization of hard spheres from a supersaturated metastable liquid though direct simulations and forward flux sampling. In this first paper, we describe and test two…
We consider self-avoiding lattice polygons, in the hypercubic lattice, as a model of a ring polymer adsorbed at a surface and either being desorbed by the action of a force, or pushed towards the surface. We show that, when there is no…
We analyze the crystallization and collapse transition of a simple model for flexible polymer chains on simple cubic and face-centered cubic lattices by means of sophisticated chain-growth methods. In contrast to bond-fluctuation polymer…
We propose a continuum model to describe the molecular alignment in thin nematic shells. By contrast with previous accounts, the two-dimensional free energy, aimed at describing the physics of thin films of nematics deposited on curved…
Based upon kinetic Monte Carlo simulations of crystallization in a simple polymer model we present a new picture of the mechanism by which the thickness of lamellar polymer crystals is constrained to a value close to the minimum…
We solve a two dimensional model for polymer chain folding in the presence of mechanical pulling force ($f$) exactly using equilibrium statistical mechanics. Using analytically derived expression for the partition function we determine the…
We prove strong crystallization results in two dimensions for an energy that arises in the theory of block copolymers. The energy is defined on sets of points and their weights, or equivalently on the set of atomic measures. It consists of…
In frameworks of scaling theory of phase transitions and critical phenomena the structure of melt-crystallized polymers is discussed. The model constructed follows drawing polymeric materials and dissipating the energy during the transition…
We study the thermodynamic properties of a semiflexible polymer confined inside strips of widths L<=9 defined on a square lattice. The polymer is modeled as a self-avoiding walk and a short range interaction between the monomers and the…
The energetics of transformation of a planar fragment of a graphite monolayer into a spherical cluster is studied. The path considered is that a flat cluster rolls up into a segment of a spherical shell. The energy landscape of the process…
We study the kinetics of crystallization in deeply supercooled liquid silicon employing computer simulations and the Stillinger-Weber three body potential. The free energy barriers to crystallisation are computed using umbrella sampling…