Topological Entanglement and Its Relation to Polymer Material Properties

In this manuscript we review recent results that show how measures of topological entanglement can be used to provide information relevant to dynamics and mechanics of polymers. We use Molecular Dynamics simulations of coarse-grained models of polymer melts and solutions of linear chains in different settings. We apply the writhe to give estimates of the entanglement length and to study the disentanglement of polymer melts in an elongational flow. Our results also show that our topological measures correlate with viscoelastic properties of the material.