Conformations of Entangled Semiflexible Polymers: Entropic Trapping and Transient Non‐Equilibrium Distributions

Abstract

The tube model is a central concept in polymer physics, and allows one to reduce the complex many-filament problem of an entangled polymer solution to a single-filament description. We investigate the probability distribution function of conformations of confinement tubes and single encaged filaments in entangled semiflexible polymer solutions. Computer simulations are developed that mimic the actual dynamics of confined polymers in disordered systems with topological constraints on time scales above local equilibration, but well below large-scale rearrangement of the network. We observe the statistical distribution of curvatures and compare our results to recent experimental findings. Unexpectedly, the observed distributions show distinctive differences from free polymers even in the absence of excluded volume. Extensive simulations permit to attribute these features to entropic trapping in network void spaces. The transient non-equilibrium distributions are shown to be a generic feature in quenched-disorder systems on intermediate time scales.