A team from the Olsen lab measured the gel point of an end-linked poly(ethylene glycol) gel during forward (bond forming) and reverse (bond breaking) gelation and degelation processes to interrogate how the gel point scales with synthesis concentration, where decreased concentration leads to an increased prevalence of inelastic loops. The experiments and simulations show that forward and reverse gel points diverge as the gel system becomes more dilute, suggesting that kinetic effects cause a departure from the percolation behavior in defect-rich gels.
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