Nanoscale Study of Polymer Dynamics

The thermal motion of polymer chains in a crowded environment is anisotropic and highly confined. Whereas theoretical and experimental progress has been made, typically only indirect evidence of polymer dynamics is obtained either from scattering or mechanical response. Toward a complete understanding of the complicated polymer dynamics in crowded media such as biological cells, it is of great importance to unravel the role of heterogeneity and molecular individualism. In the present work, we investigate the dynamics of synthetic polymers and the tube-like motion of individual chains using time-resolved fluorescence microscopy. A single fluorescently labeled polymer molecule is observed in a sea of unlabeled polymers, giving access to not only the dynamics of the probe chain itself but also to that of the surrounding network. We demonstrate that it is possible to extract the characteristic time constants and length scales in one experiment, providing a detailed understanding of polymer dynamics at the single chain level. The quantitative agreement with bulk rheology measurements is promising for using local probes to study heterogeneity in complex, crowded systems.