Dynamic Critical Phenomena of Polymer Solutions

Abstract

Recently, a systematic experiment measuring critical anomaly of viscosity of polymer solutions has been reported by Tanaka et al. [Phys. Rev. E 65 (2002) 021802]. According to their experiments, the dynamic critical exponent of viscosity y c drastically decreases with increasing the molecular weight. In this article the kinetic coefficients renormalized by the non-linear hydrodynamic interaction are calculated by the mode coupling theory. We predict that the critical divergence of viscosity should be suppressed with increasing the molecular weight. The diffusion constant and the dynamic structure factor are also calculated. The present results explicitly show that the critical dynamics of polymer solutions should be affected by an extra spatio-temporal scale intrinsic to polymer solutions, and are consistent with the experiment of Tanaka et al.