Spatial Organization of Slit-Confined Melts of Ring Polymers with Nonconserved Topology: A Lattice Monte Carlo Study

We present Monte Carlo computer simulations for melts of semiflexible randomly knotted and randomly concatenated ring polymers on the fcc lattice and in slit confinement. Through systematic variation of the slit width at fixed melt density, we explore the influence of confinement on single-chain conformations and interchain interactions. We demonstrate that confinement makes chains globally larger and more elongated while enhancing both contacts and knottedness propensities. As for multichain properties, we show that ring-ring contacts decrease with the confinement, yet neighboring rings overlap more as confinement grows. These aspects are accompanied by a marked decrease in the links formed between pairs of neighboring rings. In connection with the quantitative relation between links and entanglements in polymer melts recently established by us [Ubertini M. A.; Rosa A.Macromolecules2023, 56, 3354-3362], we propose that confinement can be used to set polymer networks that act softer under mechanical stress and suggest a viable experimental setup to validate our results.