Brillouin light scattering measurements have been used to study the stress induced modification in the elastic properties of two glass forming polymers: polybutadiene and epoxy-amine resin, prototypes of linear and network polymers, respectively. Following the usual thermodynamic path to the glass transition, polybutadiene has been studied as a function of temperature from the liquid well into ...

Drying of a sessile drop of a complex liquid can lead to intriguing complex shapes. We report here a study dealing with a model system, made of a hydrosoluble polymer that is glassy when pure. Under solvent evaporation, polymers accumulate near the vapor/drop interface and may form a glassy skin, which bends as the volume of liquid it encloses decreases. The conditions for the occurrence of thi...

Elucidating the physics of a concentrated suspension of ring polymers, or of an ensemble of ring polymers in a complex environment, is an important outstanding question in polymer physics. Many of the characteristic features of these systems arise due to topological interactions between polymers, or between the polymers and the environment, and it is often challenging to describe this quantitat...

Glassy polymers show "strain hardening": at constant extensional load, their flow first accelerates, then arrests. Recent experiments have found this to be accompanied by a striking and unexplained dip in the segmental relaxation time. Here we explain such behavior by combining a minimal model of flow-induced liquefaction of a glass with a description of the stress carried by strained polymers,...

A series of thiol-Michael and radical thiol-ene network polymers were successfully prepared from ester-free as well as ester-containing monomer formulations. Polymerization reaction rates, dynamic mechanical analysis, and solvent resistance experiments were performed and compared between compositions with varied ester loading. The incorporation of ester-free alkyl thiol, vinyl sulfone and allyl...