Entangled polymer systems

Topological constraints, referred to as entanglements in the literature, dominate the viscoelastic behavior of high molecular weight polymeric liquids. To give a microscopic foundation of the phenomenological tube models which successfully describe this behavior, we have recently introduced a method for identifying the so-called primitive path mesh that characterizes the microscopic topological state of (computer generated) conformations of long-chain polymer networks, melts and solutions. Here we give a short account of this approach and discuss some applications.