Reply to the ‘Comment on “Effects of topological constraints on linked ring polymers in solvents of varying quality”’ by M. Tsige and H. Guo, Soft Matter, 2024, 20, DOI: 10.1039/D3SM01614E

Abstract

In the preceding Comment, Drs Tsige and Guo compare their findings about the θ-temperatures of linear chains, ring polymers and poly[n]catenanes with those of previous work by us [Z. A. Dehaghani, I. Chubak, C. N. Likos and M. R. Ejtehadi, Soft Matter, 2020, 16, 3029–3038] and point out that the ordering they obtain for these three quantities is, for large degrees of polymerisation, the reverse of the one we had found in our own investigations. We thank the authors of the Comment for their remarks and we appreciate their detailed investigations, which emphasise the importance of understanding the properties of topological polymers and their behaviour under varying solvent quality. We point out, however, that the discrepancy found by Tsige and Guo is only apparent because it pertains to the Θ-temperature of rings and poly[n]catenanes with the same overall molecular weight, whereas in our work we compared the Θ-temperature of a constituent ring of the poly[n]catenane with that of the entire mechanically linked macromulecule.