Abstract
We investigated the viscoelastic effects on the early stage spinodal decomposition (SD) in semidilute polymer solutions where the coupling of stress and diffusion plays an important role. The so-called viscoelastic length ξve, within which the stress suppresses the growth of the concentration fluctuations, was quantitatively evaluated experimentally. The evaluated value was found out to become as large as 9.0×102 nm. The obtained value ξve agrees well with that independently estimated from the diffusion and viscoelasticity measurements, indicating that the Doi-Onuki theory can well describe the viscoelastic effects on the dynamics of the early stage SD.
