| Issue |
EPL
Volume 105, Number 4, February 2014
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | 48005 | |
| Number of page(s) | 6 | |
| Section | Interdisciplinary Physics and Related Areas of Science and Technology | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/105/48005 | |
| Published online | 11 March 2014 | |
Melt of polymer rings: The decorated loop model
1 Institut Charles Sadron, CNRS- UdS - 23 rue du Loess, 67034 Strasbourg Cédex 2, France
2 Department of Physics, University of Florida - Gainesville, FL, USA
Received: 19 December 2013
Accepted: 18 February 2014
Melts of unconcatenated and unknotted polymer rings are a paradigm for soft matter ruled by topological interactions. We propose a description of a system of rings of length N as a collection of smaller polydisperse Gaussian loops, ranging from the entanglement length to the skeleton ring length 
, assembled in random trees. Individual rings in the melt are predicted to be marginally compact with a mean square radius of gyration 
. As a rule, simple power laws for asymptotically long rings come with sluggish crossovers. Experiments and computer simulations merely deal with crossover regimes typically extending to 
. The estimated crossover functions allow for a satisfactory fit of simulation data.
PACS: 83.80.Sg – Polymer melts / 82.35.Lr – Physical properties of polymers / 83.10.Rs – Computer simulation of molecular and particle dynamics
© EPLA, 2014
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