Statics and Dynamics of the "Liquid-" and "Solidlike" Degrees of Freedom in Lightly Cross-Linked Polymer Networks

Abstract
The density-density correlation function, that determines the angular dependence of the scattering intensity, is calculated for strongly deformed, lightly cross-linked polymer networks. The replica variant of the tube model is used to take into account the entanglement effects. It is shown that the contribution of thermally driven (annealed) density fluctuations to this correlation function is small with respect to the contribution of frozen-in (quenched) fluctuations. We also calculate the free energy functional for such "soft" solids, taking into account liquid- as well as solid-like degrees of freedom at different spatial scales. The dynamics of the "abnormal butterfly effect" is theoretically studied.