The formation and structure of Olympic gels

Different methods for creating Olympic gels are analyzed using computer simulations. First ideal reference samples are obtained from freely interpenetrating semi-dilute solutions and melts of cyclic polymers. The distribution of pairwise concatenations per cyclic molecule is given by a Poisson-distribution and can be used to describe the elastic structure of the gels. Several batches of linear chains decorated with different selectively binding groups at their ends are mixed in the DNA Origami technique and network formation is realized. While the formation of cyclic molecules follows mean field predictions below overlap of the precursor molecules, an enhanced ring formation above overlap is found that is not explained by mean field arguments. The progressive construction method allows to create Olympic gels with a single reaction step from a concentrated mixture of large compressed rings with a low weight fraction of short chains that are below overlap concentration. This method, however, is limited by the difficulty to obtain a sufficiently high degree of polymerization of the large rings. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.