Scientific Achievement
The upper panel illustrates the configuration of the SANS experiment. The bottom panel shows the 2D SANS spectra become progressively isotropic as the polymer relaxes the stress. (hi-res image)
Revealed how the molecular relaxation of deformed polymers is related in space and time by developing a novel approach for analyzing 2D small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) spectrum.
Significance and Impact
Provided a quantitative method for analyzing the structural anisotropy relaxation of polymers.
Research Details
– Combined precise synthesis and SANS experiments with HPC-enabled non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations on deformed polymer melts.
– Demonstrated that entanglement has a very weak influence on the microscopic mechanism of single-chain structural anisotropy relaxation.
C. N. Lam, W.-S. Xu, W.-R. Chen, Z. Wang, C. B. Stanley, J.-M. Carrillo, D. Uhrig, W. Wang, K. Hong, Y. Liu, L. Porcar, C. Do, G. S. Smith, B. G. Sumpter, and Y. Wang, “Scaling behavior of anisotropy relaxation in deformed polymer,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 117801 (2018). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.117801
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