Polymer dynamics: long time simulations and topological constraints

Abstract

Topological constraints, entanglements, dominate the viscoelastic behavior of high molecular weight polymeric liquids. To give a microscopic foundation of the phenomenological tube, recently a method for identifying the so called primitive path mesh that characterizes the microscopic topological state of (computer generated) conformations of long-chain polymer networks, melts and solutions was introduced. Here we give a short account of this approach and compare this to long time simulations.