The system visualised below is a randomly crosslinked network consisting of 80 chains of length 3500 with 1400 crosslinks producing an exponential strand length distribution with average strand length of 100. See the PRL and Polymer paper for a long and quantitative explanation.
Localisation. Shown below is the thermal fluctuations of three segments in the unstrained network, strained 2x and 4x. Clearly the tube diameter parallel and perpendicular to the direction of elongation is deformed when the network is strained. The segments has been coloured green and blue, and at strain 4 the striped pattern of the tube shows that effect of longitudinal fluctuations have been significantly reduced.
Below is shown the same configurations as above, but affinely back compressed into the unstrained box. One observed that the large scale structure of the tube is more or less unaffected, indicating an affine strain response, however, at short length scales the tubes appears compressed. This shows that at short length scales the tube deforms in a sub-affine manner.
