ENTANGLEMENT-LOOSENING DYNAMICS RESOLVED THROUGH COMPARISON OF DIELECTRIC AND VISCOELASTIC DATA OF TYPE-A POLYMERS: A REVIEW

Abstract

ABSTRACT For so-called type-A polymer chains having electrical dipoles aligned parallel along their backbone, the large-scale chain motion over the end-to-end distance results in not only viscoelastic but also dielectric relaxation. These two relaxation processes detect the same motion but with different averaging moments, which enables us to experimentally resolve some details of the chain dynamics through comparison of viscoelastic and dielectric data of type-A polymers. For a typical type-A polymer, high-cis polyisoprene (PI), results of such an experimental approach are summarized to discuss characteristic features of an entanglement-loosening process (constraint release and/or dynamic tube dilation process) resolved from the data comparison.