Accelerating the Vulcanization of Caoutchouc

Theory & Practice Of Vulcanization

Density-correlator signatures of the vulcanization transition

Certain density correlators, measurable via various experimental techniques, are studied in the context of the vulcanization transition. It is shown that these correlators contain essential information about both the vulcanization transition and the emergent amorphous solid state. Contact is made with various physical ingredients that have featured in experimental studies of amorphous colloidal...

Vulcanization and the Properties of Rubber

Rubber is composed of long stringlike polymer molecules, which are pinned together at random points by crosslinks. As the density of crosslinks is increased, the molecules get localized and the system undergoes a phase transition from a liquid to an amorphous solid state. The elastic properties of the resulting solid are very different from those of metals, and are primarily due to changes in t...

Connecting the vulcanization transition to percolation.

The vulcanization transition is addressed via a minimal replica-field-theoretic model. The appropriate long-wavelength behavior of the two- and three-point vertex functions is considered diagrammatically, to all orders in perturbation theory, and identified with the corresponding quantities in the Houghton-Reeve-Wallace field-theoretic approach to the percolation critical phenomenon. Hence, it ...

Emergent Physics at the Vulcanization Transition

The Essay starts with an overview of the percolation approach and classical elasticity theory of the vulcanization transition of rubber, describing their assumptions and their limitations. Thereafter we discuss a third approach, the Vulcanization Theory (VT) which incorporates the effects of thermal fluctuations and quenched random disorder. The VT is an order parameter theory in the true Landa...