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Research Highlight

Fingerprinting Polymer Brownian Motions under Flow

Fingerprinting Polymer Brownian Motions under Flow
(a) Illustration of the two reference frames for decomposing polymer self-dynamics under flow. (b) c.m. dynamics in the flow frame. (c) Monomer dynamics in the c.m. frame.

Scientific Achievement

A novel quantitative approach reveals universal features of polymer Brownian motions under flow.

 

Significance and Impact

Characterizing the dynamic correlations of polymers under flow has been notoriously difficult due to the position-dependent convection effect. The new approach developed in this work provides a concrete, quantitative framework for analyzing the self-motions of polymers under flow.

 

Research Details

  • New framework is based on a set of complementary reference frames and the spherical harmonic expansion technique.
  • Non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations of coarse-grained polymer melts were performed
  • The self-motions of polymers under flow exhibit a number of universal features such as how flow significantly increases dynamic heterogeneity
 

Z. Shen, J.-M. Y. Carrillo, B. G. Sumpter, and Y. Wang, Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 057801 (2022). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.057801