Issue 12, 2014

The tube axis and entanglements in polymer melts

Abstract

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.

Graphical abstract: The tube axis and entanglements in polymer melts

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
04 Oct 2013
Accepted
04 Dec 2013
First published
05 Dec 2013

Soft Matter, 2014,10, 1895-1904

The tube axis and entanglements in polymer melts

A. E. Likhtman, Soft Matter, 2014, 10, 1895 DOI: 10.1039/C3SM52575A

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