The viscoelastic signature underpinning polymer deformation under shear flow
Entangled polymers are deformed by a strong shear flow. The shape of the polymer, called the form factor, is measured by small angle neutron scattering. However, the real-space molecular structure is not directly available from the reciprocal-space data, due to the phase problem. Instead, the data has to be fitted with a theoretical model of the molecule. We approximate the unknown structure using