Shear suppression of critical fluctuations in a diluted polymer blend

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Abstract
Small-angle neutron scattering has been combined with equilibrium dynamic light scattering to study shear-induced mixing in a diluted high-molecular-weight polymer blend. The data show an enhancement of critical fluctuations upon dilution and are found to collapse onto a universal scaling curve containing no free parameters. This scaling curve is motivated by the theoretical predictions of Onuki and Kawasaki for undiluted binary mixtures. The data also appear to suggest that "Fisher renormalization" is relevant in this diluted pseudobinary polymer mixture, consistent with a previous dynamic-light-scattering study.