Research report 2004 - Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems

Microscopic Topology and Macroscopic Elasticity of Polymers

Authors
Everaers, Ralf
Departments

Physik biologischer und weicher Materie (Dr. Ralf Everaers)
MPI für Physik komplexer Systeme, Dresden

Summary
The viscoselastic properties of high molecular weight polymeric liquids are dominated by topological constraints on a molecular scale. Similar to entangled ropes, polymer chains can slide past but not through each other. Tube models of polymer dynamics and rheology are based on the idea that entanglements confine a chain to small fluctuations around a primitive path. To provide a microscopic foundation for these highly successful phenomenological models, we have introduced a method for analyzing the microscopic topological state of polymeric liquids in terms of primitive paths. The resulting parameter-free predicitions for the plateau modulus agree with experiment for all major classes of synthetic polymers.

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