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Updated: May 5, 2026

Synthesis of Cyclic Polymers and Characterization of Their Diffusive Motion in the Melt State at the Single Molecule Level
Published on: September 26, 2016
Fluctuation effects on the order-disorder transition in polydisperse copolymer melts
1Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA.
Abstract:
Using single chain in mean field simulation approach, we examine the influence of fluctuation effects on the order-disorder transition (ODT) of polydisperse copolymer systems. We consider two model systems: (i) molecular weight polydisperse systems represented by AB diblock copolymer melts having monodisperse A blocks and polydisperse B blocks; and (ii) compositionally polydisperse symmetric diblock copolymer systems. In each case, we present results for the fluctuation-induced shift in the ODT from the corresponding mean-field predictions. In both models, an increase in polydispersity enhances the influence of fluctuations. Moreover, for compositionally polydisperse systems, we observe that the effects of fluctuations show similar trends in systems containing quenched and annealed representation of sequences.
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