Dynamics of living polymers and flexible surfactant micelles : scaling laws for dilution

Abstract

A theoretical model, recently introduced to describe the dynamics of reversibly breakable polymer chains at high density, is extended to the semidilute regime. It is known that, in this regime, the excluded volume statistics of the system can differ significantly from those of unbreakable polymers of comparable molecular weight (because of the presence of closed rings). These changes also affect the scaling exponents for the concentration dependence of the viscosity and monomer diffusion constant. In general, the range of concentrations over which scaling (as opposed to mean-field) behaviour can be expected is probably rather small