In this talk, I will report on recent results regarding the emergence of structurally arrested states in polymer melts, in which a fraction or all of the polymers display a particular type of activity. Specifically, we will consider polymers for which a block of the monomers is always thermostated at a temperature higher than the remaining block, the rest of the interactions being identical among all beads. We demonstrate that this situation leads to the emergence of a topologically arrested state [1] whose structure is similar to microphone-separated block copolymer melts [2]. The precursor of the glass formation is directed, superdiffusive chain motion whose emergence has been recently understood by an entropic tug-of-war mechanism in a topologically constraint medium [3].
[1] Jan Smrek, Iurii Chubak, Christos N. Likos and Kurt Kremer, Active topological glass, Nature Communications 11, 26 (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-13696-z
[2] Iurii Chubak, Christos N. Likos, Kurt Kremer, and Jan Smrek, Emergence of active topological glass through directed chain dynamics and non-equilibrium phase segregation, Physical Review Research 2, 043239 (2020). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevResearch.2.043249
[3] Adam H. T. P. Höfler, Iurii Chubak, Christos N. Likos, and Jan Smrek, Entropic tug of war: Topological constraints spontaneously rectify the dynamics of a polymer with heterogeneous fluctuations, Physical Review X 16, 011046 (2026). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/rkms-2v1l