We survey results of computer simulations for the structure and dynamics of supercooled polymer melts and films. Our survey is mainly concerned with features of a coarse grained polymer model-a bead-spring model-in the temperature regime above the critical glass temperature T c of the ideal modecoupling theory (MCT). We divide our discussion into two parts: a part devoted to bulk properties and a part dealing with thin films. The discussion of the bulk properties focuses on two aspects: a comparison of the simulation results with MCT and an analysis of dynamic heterogeneities. We explain in detail how the analyses are performed and what results may be obtained, and we critically assess their strengths and weaknesses. In discussing the application of MCT we also present first results of a quantitative comparison which does not rely on fits, but exploits static input from the simulation to predict the relaxation dynamics. The second part of this review is devoted to extensions of the simulations from the bulk to thin films. We explore in detail the influence of the boundary condition, imposed by smooth or rough walls, on the structure and dynamics of the polymer melt. Geometric confinement is found to shift the glass transition temperature T g (or T c in our case) relative to the bulk. We compare our and other simulation results for the T g shift with experimental data, briefly survey some theoretical ideas for explaining these shifts and discuss related simulation work on the glass transition of confined liquids. Finally, we also present some technical details of how to perform fits to MCT and give a brief introduction to another approach to the glass transition based on the potential energy landscape of a liquid.

Presenting theoretical arguments and numerical results we demonstrate long-range intrachain correlations in concentrated solutions and melts of long flexible polymers which cause a systematic swelling of short chain segments. They can be traced back to the incompressibility of the melt leading to an effective repulsion u(s) ≈ s/ρR 3 (s) ≈ c e / √ s when connecting two segments together where s denotes the curvilinear length of a segment, R(s) its typical size, c e ≈ 1/ρb 3 e the "swelling coefficient", b e the effective bond length and ρ the monomer density. The relative deviation of the segmental size distribution from the ideal Gaussian chain behavior is found to be proportional to u(s). The analysis of different moments of this distribution allows for a precise determination of the effective bond length b e and the swelling coefficient c e of asymptotically long chains. At striking variance to the short-range decay suggested by Flory's ideality hypothesis the bond-bond correlation function of two bonds separated by s monomers along the chain is found to decay algebraically as 1/s 3/2 . Effects of finite chain length are considered briefly. PACS numbers: 61.25.Hq,64.60.Ak,05.40.Fb * Electronic address: jwittmer@ics.u-strasbg.fr † URL: http://www-ics.u-strasbg.fr/~etsp/welcome.php 1 I. FLORY'S IDEALITY HYPOTHESIS REVISITEDA cornerstone of polymer physics. Polymer melts are dense disordered systems consisting of macromolecular chains [1]. Theories that predict properties of chains in a melt or concentrated solutions generally start from the "Flory ideality hypothesis" formulated already in the 1940s by Flory [2,3,4]. This cornerstone of polymer physics states that chain conformations correspond to "ideal" random walks on length scales much larger than the monomer diameter [1,4,5,6]. The commonly accepted justification of this mean-field result is that intrachain and interchain excluded volume forces compensate each other if many chains strongly overlap which is the case for three-dimensional melts [5]. Since these systems are essentially incompressible, density fluctuations are known to be small. Hence, all correlations are supposed to be short-ranged as has been systematically discussed first by Edwards who developed the essential statistical mechanical tools [6,7,8,9, 10] also used in this paper.One immediate consequence of Flory's hypothesis is that the mean-squared size of chain segments of curvilinear length s = m − n (with 1 ≤ n < m < N) should scale as R Both equations are expected to hold as long as the moment is not too high for a given segment length and the finite-extensibility of the polymer strand remains irrelevant [6].Deviations caused by the segmental correlation hole effect. Recently, Flory's hypothesis has been challenged both theoretically [11,12,13,14,15] and numerically for threedimensional solutions [16,17,18,19,20] and ultrathin films [21,22]. These studies suggest 2 that intra-and interchain excluded volume forces do not fully compensate each other on intermediate length scales, l...

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By means of molecular dynamics simulations and scaling theory we study the response of opposing polymer brushes to constant shear motion under good solvent conditions. Model systems that contain explicit solvent molecules (Lennard-Jones dimers) are compared to solvent-free systems while varying of the distance between the grafted layers and their molecular parameters, chain length and grafting density. Our study reveals a power-law dependence of macroscopic transport properties on the Weissenberg number, W, beyond linear response. For instance, we find that the kinetic friction constant scales as mu approximately W(0.57) for large values of W. We develop a scaling theory that describes our data and previous numerical data including recent experiments.

We present results of molecular dynamics simulations for free-standing and supported thin films of a nonentangled polymer melt using a coarse-grained (beadspring) model. Our discussion is mainly concerned with the equilibrium properties of the films above the critical temperature (T c ) of mode-coupling theory, although we also determine the glass-transition temperature (T g ) by measurements of the film thickness h upon cooling. We explore the influence of confinement on the structure and dynamics of the polymer films. We find that the dynamics in the films is accelerated compared to the bulk, that this enhanced mobility originates from the surfaces, and that the effect is larger at the free than at the supported surface. Thus, the films have lower T c values relative to the bulk. T c depends on film thickness h; this dependence can be well parametrized by T c (h) = T bulk c /(1 + h 0 /h), a function proposed by experiments on supported polystyrene films.

We present data of Monte Carlo simulations for monodisperse linear polymer chains in dense melts with degrees of polymerization between N = 16 and N = 512. The aim of this study is to investigate the crossover from Rouselike dynamics for short chains to reptation-like dynamics for long chains. To address this problem we calculate a variety of different quantities: standard mean-square displacements of inner monomers and of the chain's center of mass, the recently proposed cubic invariant [U. Ebert et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 78, 1592.], persistence of bond-vector orientation with time, and the auto-correlation functions of the bond vector, the end-to-end vector and the Rouse modes. This analysis reveals that the crossover from non-to entangled dynamics is very protracted. Only the largest chain length N = 512, which is about 13 times larger than the entanglement length, shows evidence for reptation.

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