Regensburg 2007 – scientific programme
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CPP: Fachverband Chemische Physik und Polymerphysik
CPP 5: Polymer Physics II
CPP 5.4: Talk
Monday, March 26, 2007, 15:15–15:30, H40
Untangling polymer systems: Structure prediction in polymer networks with quenched disorder — •Abigail Klopper1, Ralf Everaers2, and Carsten Svaneborg3 — 1Max-Planck-Institut fuer Physik komplexer Systeme, Dresden — 2Laboratoire de Physique, Ecole Normale Superieure Lyon, France — 3Department of Chemistry, University of Aarhus, Denmark
Highly concentrated liquids comprising long polymeric chains can undergo processes of cross-linking and entanglement, giving rise to intriguing macroscopic properties. The key ingredient is connective quenched disorder, which freezes the topology of the liquid in the form of a polymer network. The translational invariance in the system is spontaneously broken and the phase space is divided into disjoint ergodic regions.
Such behaviour is well-known from a large class of systems exhibiting the so-called glassy phase, characterised by randomness and slow dynamics. This opens the door to an extensive analytic formalism for structure prediction in cross-linked polymer systems. By constructing a theoretical framework which makes use of simulation data, one can draw from these techniques without resorting to microscopic detail and otherwise unphysical assumptions. In the study presented, the spin-glass replica formalism is applied to data from molecular dynamics simulations of ideal non-interacting cross-linked polymer systems in order to describe neutron scattering measurements in interacting systems.