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Arrested swelling of highly entangled polymer globules
Nam-Kyung Lee1, Cameron F Abrams, A Johner
1Laboratoire Européen Associé ICS Strasbourg, France)/MPIP(Mainz, Germany).
Physical Review Letters
|July 15, 2003
Summary
Aging polymers form entangled globules that swell in two stages: rapid stretching and slow disentanglement. Computer simulations reveal distinct mass-mass and entanglement-entanglement correlations, indicating distance-dependent repulsion between polymer entanglements.
Area of Science:
- Polymer Physics
- Soft Matter Physics
- Computational Chemistry
Background:
- Aging long polymer chains leads to self-entangled globules, resembling complex knots.
- The swelling of these polymer globules in good solvents is a complex, multi-step process.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the correlation patterns within swollen polymer globules.
- To analyze the relationship between mass distribution and entanglement distribution during polymer swelling.
Main Methods:
- Utilized advanced computer simulations to model polymer behavior.
- Analyzed mass-mass (m-m) and entanglement-entanglement (e-e) correlations within the simulated polymer structures.
Main Results:
- Identified distinct power law correlations for both mass-mass and entanglement-entanglement within swollen globules.
- Observed that entanglement-entanglement correlations exhibit exponents approximately 0.3 higher than mass-mass correlations.
- Found evidence supporting a distance-dependent repulsion between entanglements sliding along the polymer chain.
Conclusions:
- The swelling process involves conserved entanglement topology followed by slow disentanglement.
- The observed differences in correlation exponents suggest a repulsive interaction governing entanglement dynamics.
- This study provides quantitative insights into the complex behavior of entangled polymers in solution.