Relaxation dynamics of semiflexible treelike small-world polymer networks.

Abstract

We study the relaxation dynamics of the polymer networks that are constructed based on a degree distribution specific to small-world networks. The employed building algorithm generates polymers with a large variety of architectures, thus allowing for a detailed study of the structural transition from a pure linear chain to dendritic polymer networks. This is done by varying a single parameter p, which measures the randomness in the degree of the network's nodes. The dynamics is investigated in the framework of the generalized Gaussian structures model by monitoring the influence of the parameter p and of the stiffness parameter q on the behavior of the relaxation quantities: averaged monomer displacement, storage modulus, and loss modulus. The structure properties of the constructed polymers are described by the mean-square radius of gyration. In the absence of stiffness, in the intermediate frequencies domain of the dynamical quantities we encounter different behaviours, such as a dendritic behavior followed by a linear one for very small values of p or a single well-marked dendritic behavior for higher values of p. The stiffness parameter q influences drastically the relaxation dynamics of these polymer networks and in general no evident scaling regions were encountered. However, for some values of the parameter set (p,q), such as (0.8,0.4), an extremely short constant slope region, less than one order of magnitude, was found.