Tumbling and tank-treading dynamics of individual ring polymers in shear flow

Abstract

The dynamics of individual ring polymers in a shear flow is studied by a hybrid mesoscale simulation approach. New insight into the dynamics of ring polymers is provided: ring polymers exhibit both tumbling and tank-treading motions. A novel angle autocorrelation function is proposed to analyze the tank-treading motion that usually coexists with tumbling and may be applied to other highly deformable soft objects such as vesicles. The shear dependence of the average gyration tensor, the orientation angle, the tumbling and the tank-treading frequencies is determined quantitatively. The simulations also reveal that the existence of the tank-treading motion apparently increases the intrinsic viscosity of ring polymers under shear flow.