Analytic Solution for the Linear Rheology of Living Polymers

Abstract

It is often said that well-entangled and fast-breaking living polymers (such as wormlike micelles) exhibit a single relaxation time in their reptation dynamics, but the full story is somewhat more complicated. Understanding departures from single-Maxwell behavior is crucial for fitting and interpreting experimental data, but in some limiting cases numerical methods of solving living polymer models can struggle to produce reliable predictions/interpretations. In this work, we develop an analytic solution for the shuffling model of living polymers. The analytic solution is a converging infinite series, and it converges fastest in the fast-breaking limit where other methods can struggle.