The paper for the entangled polymer solutions has been published. This paper describes a new method in which the dissipative particle dynamics is combined with the slip-spring technique.
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.macromol.6b01971
For this specific study, there is a long story. Originally, this work was attempted by a German student, Dr Michael Langeloth in Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany.
I met Michael first when his supervisor, Prof. Florian Müller-Plathe, kindly invited me to his group on 2012 (4 years back already…). I stayed there for several weeks and Michael kindly allowed me to share his office. He was attempted to develop a new dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) technique in which the entanglement of polymers is taken account. In usual DPD, entanglement dynamics does not appear because the polymer chains cross each other. I collaborated with Michael on that part because I worked with Prof. Uneyama on a similar (essentially the same) problem. Michael succeeded to develop the DPD code with entanglement, and he made a couple of publications for polymer melts.
Michael extended his code to entangled solutions as well. At that time, I was in Kyoto, and I got a budget to invite Michael to Kyoto. We collaborated again to extend the method for solutions, and it seemed succeeded. Then Michael submitted a paper, but very unfortunately it was rejected. In my view, the study deserves publication, but we could not make good replies to the reviewers because Michael left the university to get his position in a company. Now he is doing something completely different. In such a situation, he can hardly work for his old topic. It happened last year, early summer. A possible option might be to submit the paper to the other journal but I do not like such a strategy.
To accumulate sufficient results (to convince the reviewers), I wrote the code by myself from scratch, and I performed the new simulations. Well, it would be an option to use the Michael’s code, but to me making a new code is almost always easier than reading a code written by the others. In addition, learning from the previous attempt (in particular, from the comments from the reviewers,) I changed the kinetics of entanglement. I have added the experimental results as well, in collaboration with Prof. Inoue in Osaka University. Then I wrote the paper, and submitted it to Macromolecules that rejected our paper once but now it accepts the work.