A MONTE-CARLO STUDY OF THERMODYNAMIC RELAXATION IN LIVING POLYMERS

We report the first numeric experiments on the thermodynamic relaxation in living polymers (polymers that can break and recombine reversibly) whose molecular weight distribution (MWD) is perturbed from equilibrium by a T-jump and then allowed to relax. In the simulation we use a modification of the Bond Fluctuation Method which is known to reproduce the correct Rouse dynamics of polymer chains. Our results indicate an excellent agreement with the predictions of a recently suggested theory [1,2] of relaxation in living polymer systems.