Effect of chain stiffness on the entropic segregation of chain ends to the surface of a polymer melt
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Entropic segregation of chain ends to the surface of a monodisperse polymer melt and its effect on surface tension are examined using self-consistent field theory (SCFT). In order to assess the dependence on chain stiffness, the SCFT is solved for worm-like chains. Our focus is still on relatively flexible polymers, where the persistence length of the polymer, ℓp, is comparable to the width of the surface profile, ξ, but still much smaller than the total contour length of the polymer, ℓc. Even this small degree of rigidity causes a substantial increase in the level of segregation, relative to that of totally flexible Gaussian chains. Nevertheless, the long-range depletion that balances the surface excess still exhibits the same universal shape derived for Gaussian chains. Furthermore, the excess continues to reduce the surface tension by one unit of kBT per chain end, which results in the usual N−1 reduction in surface tension observed by experiments. This enhanced segregation will also extend to polydisperse melts, causing the molecular-weight distribution at the surface to shift towards smaller Nn relative to the bulk. This provides a partial explanation for recent quantitative differences between experiments and SCFT calculations for flexible polymers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".