Topological Analysis and Recovery of Entanglements in Polymer Melts.

ABSTRACT: The viscous flow of polymer chains in dense melts is dominated by topological constraints whenever the single-chain contour length, N, becomes larger than the characteristic scale N_e, defining comprehensively the macroscopic rheological properties of the highly entangled polymer systems. Even though they are naturally connected to the presence of hard constraints like knots and links within the polymer chains, the difficulty of integrating the rigorous language of mathematical topology with the physics of polymer melts has limited somehow a genuine topological approach to the problem of classifying these constraints and to how they are related to the rheological entanglements. In this work, we tackle this problem by studying the occurrence of knots and links in lat

SUBMITTER: Ubertini MA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10173697 | biostudies-literature | 2023 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature