Metabasin dynamics of supercooled polymer melt*

Abstract

We employ molecular dynamic simulation to investigate metabasin dynamics for supercooled polymer melt. We find that, in a small system, the α-relaxation process is composed of a few crossing events that the monomers hops from one metabasin to another. Each crossing event is very rapid and involves a democratic movement of many particles, whereas such collective motion is not string-like. Evaluation on the contributions of metabasin exploration and democratic movement shows that the structural relaxation is mostly governed by the latter. Our calculated results show that the metabasin–metabasin transitions are not the main reason of spatially dynamical heterogeneity. It is different from the binary Lennard–Jones mixture model in which the metabasin–metabasin transitions are relevant for the spatially dynamical heterogeneity.