Stress relaxation in polymer melts and concentrated solutions

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Abstract
It is a widespread assumption that the backbone stress is dominant in polymer melts and concentrated solutions. This work suggests on the basis of Brownian simulations that the assumption is incorrect. The excluded volume stress seems to be much larger in entangled solutions of arbitrarily thin chains. A restriction to backbone stresses in the popular reptation model leads to the necessity for a rigid primitive path. To explain the persistence and eventual relaxation of the excluded volume stress, it suffices that entanglements provide elasticity on the distance scale of the radius of gyration.