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Role of Dynamical Heterogeneities in the Mechanics of Glassy Polymer
Dynamical heterogeneities in glass - and peculiarly for polymer glasses - have been since more than 20 years the object of many debates. Nowadays, the actual picture is fairly simple ; glass can be considered as tiled by nanometric domains with very different dynamics. More precisely, the dynamics of the monomer rearrangement can differ – from domains to domains - of about 4 decades at least for homopolymer system, and fairly more for more complex polymer systems. This phenomenon has various signatures for the mechanical response at the macroscopic scale. More precisely, heterogeneous dynamics and also in their mechanical coupling governs some mechanical properties. In this lecture, we will discuss the role of dynamical heterogeneities on the linear, non-linear, and confined mechanical response of polymer glasses.