Diffusion and Relaxation Dynamics of Supercooled Polymer Melts

The dynamic properties of polymer melts are investigated in the range of normal liquid regime to the supercooled liquid regime. The polymer is modeled as a coarse-grained bead-spring model with chain length ranging from 5 to 160. The mean squared displacement and non-Gaussian parameter are used to describe the self diffusion of polymer beads. We find slow dynamics with decreasing temperature and increasing chain length. The time evolution of non-Gaussian parameters shows two peaks (or one peak one shoulder) in the α-relaxation time, τα, regime and sub-diffusion time regime, respectively, where the first primary peak indicates the dynamic heterogeneity stemmed from the motion of beads, and the secondary peak is the result of correlated motion along a polymer chain. Moreover, the relaxation of polymer beads shows clear two-step decay in supercooled melts and the dynamics shows growing heterogeneity with decreasing temperature. As chain length is increased, a peak of the dynamic susceptibility occurs, and the peak height, χ*4, increases and then reaches a plateau. The curves of the height of the first peak of α2α*2, versus τα and the curves of χ*4 versus ταfollow two master curves for different chain lengths. Our results indicate the similarity of dynamic heterogeneity dominated by the motion of single bead even the chain length is different. It is interesting to find that the Stokes-Einstein (SE) relation between τα and diffusion coefficient D, D~τq−1, is highly length-scale dependent. The SE relation breaks down in both normal melts regime and supercooled regime at large magnitude of wave vectors, attributed to the non-Brownian motion arising from the chain connectivity and growing heterogeneity due to supercooling. However, the SE relation is reconstructed when the probing length scale is large (at small magnitude of wave vectors). Our results show a hierarchical physical picture of the supercooled polymeric dynamics.