Local orientational mobility in regular hyperbranched polymers

TL;DR

This paper investigates the local bond orientation dynamics in hyperbranched polymers modeled by Vicsek fractals, revealing how segment remoteness influences relaxation behavior and providing analytical tools for large structures.

Contribution

It introduces an analytical approximation and an iterative method to analyze the orientational dynamics of segments in large hyperbranched polymers.

Findings

Core segments exhibit unique scaling behavior in their dynamics.

Segment dynamics depend on remoteness from the periphery, not overall size.

Provided methods enable analysis of very large macromolecules.

Abstract

We study the dynamics of local bond orientation in regular hyperbranched polymers modeled by Vicsek fractals. The local dynamics is investigated through the temporal autocorrelation functions of single bonds and the corresponding relaxation forms of the complex dielectric susceptibility. We show that the dynamic behavior of single segments depends on their remoteness from the periphery rather than on the size of the whole macromolecule. Remarkably, the dynamics of the core segments (which are most remote from the periphery) shows a scaling behavior that differs from the dynamics obtained after structural average. We analyze the most relevant processes of single segment motion and provide an analytic approximation for the corresponding relaxation times. Furthermore, we describe an iterative method to calculate the orientational dynamics in the case of very large macromolecular sizes.