# On the Kinetics of Body versus End Evaporation and Addition of Supramolecular Polymers

## TL;DR

This paper develops a simplified dynamical Landau theory to model the kinetics of supramolecular polymerization, capturing complex behaviors like hysteresis and lag time with fewer parameters.

## Contribution

It introduces a phenomenological approach that reduces system-specific parameters and describes generic kinetic phenomena in supramolecular self-assembly.

## Key findings

- Describes hysteresis, overshooting, and lag time in polymerization.
- Identifies pathway controller as a key kinetic parameter.
- Provides conditions for observing kinetic phenomena.

## Abstract

Although pathway-specific kinetic theories are fundamentally important to describe and understand reversible polymerisation kinetics, they come in principle at a cost of having a large number of system-specific parameters. Here, we construct a dynamical Landau theory to describe the kinetics of activated linear supramolecular self-assembly, which drastically reduces the number of parameters and still describes most of the interesting and generic behavior of the system in hand. This phenomenological approach hinges on the fact that if nucleated, the polymerisation transition resembles a phase transition. We are able to describe hysteresis, overshooting, undershooting and the existence of a lag time before polymerisation takes off, and pinpoint the conditions required for observing these types of phenomenon in the assembly and disassembly kinetics. We argue that the phenomenological kinetic parameter in our theory is a pathway controller, i.e., it controls the relative weights of the molecular pathways through which self-assembly takes place.