Anomalous Stretching Dynamics of Tagged Monomer of Branched Polymer in Layered Random Flows

Abstract

We extend our formalism to theoretically understand the stretch dynamics of single tagged monomer of flexible branched polymer with arbitrary topology in the presence of layered random flows. We derived an expression for the average squared displacement of the m-th bead of an arbitrary polymer structure with respect to its center of mass. The main focus of our study is the dynamics of star and dendrimer, where the effect of the topology, viz. the number and length of branches for stars and the number of generations and spacer lengths for dendrimers, is analyzed. We predict an increase in stretching as a function of time which finally reaches to the steady-state (plateau) value. In addition, we analyze the influence of variation in external flow which is characterized through its flow exponent ($$\alpha $$), root mean square velocity ($$V_0$$) and flow strength ($$W_{\alpha }$$). The composite measure of flow strength $$W_{\alpha }$$ depends upon $$\alpha $$, $$V_0$$ and persistence length of flow. The magnitude of the maximum stretch (plateau region) increases with increase in flow exponent. The anomalous stretch behavior of star polymer with increasing flow strength shows the non-uniform stretch behavior of polymer.