title: Melt fracture of entangled polymers.
abstract: We construct a model for a slippage plane in a sheared melt, based on a balance between reptation bridging and shear debonding. The resulting state could show up at rather low shear rates and be locally stable. But it is not easy to nucleate: the conventional entangled state is also locally stable. We propose that slippage occurs on solid walls: either at the container surface, or on dust particles floating in the melt. Slippage at solid/melt interfaces was studied (experimentally and theoretically) long ago. There is a critical stress sigma* for slippage: our estimate (for strong adsorption of melt chains on the solid) gives sigma* approximately 1/3 (plateau modulus) for typical cases. Thus, melt fracture is expected at moderate stresses, in agreement with observations by S.Q. Wang and coworkers.
authors.affiliation: Institut Curie, Centre de Recherche, 26, rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, France.
authors.forename: P-G
authors.initials: PG
authors.lastname: de Gennes