An examination of the longitudinal acoustic mode of polyethylene crystals

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Abstract
Chain lengths have been calculated from the peak positions of the longitudinal acoustic modes (LAM) of polyethylene single crystals grown at several different temperatures. The data are consistent with other experimental results when the crystalline elastic modulus is taken to be 3.6 × 1012 dyn/cm2. However, this is true only if the vibrations of the crystalline chain segments are unaffected by the presence of folds and cilia on the crystal surface. The LAMs of several crystal preparations were also deconvoluted with the first-order LAM of C94H190 in order to remove instrumental broadening. The band shapes of the deconvoluted spectra are consistent with the idea that the LAM of polyethylene crystals is composed of two contributions: One due to chain stems in 110 sectors and a second due to chains in 200 sectors.