The tube axis and entanglements in polymer melts

Although the tube theory is very popular and successful, the tube concept remains evasive and ill defined. This paper proposes a simple computer algorithm to construct the tube axis as a center line of the cloud of chain configurations at different moments of time. We test this algorithm on trajectories generated from simulations of concatenated well entangled ring polymers, thus avoiding all disentanglement processes. We find that entanglements are clearly manifested through the curvature of the tube axis, and we can successfully identify binary and ternary entanglements in molecular dynamics simulations. Several quantitative characteristics of entanglements are reported and discussed.