rheological response of molten binary blends of long and short polymers. We predict that,
upon dilution with short chains, the effective stretch relaxation time of the long chains initially
increases in proportion to ϕ L-α (where ϕ L is the volume fraction of long chains and α is the
dilution exponent for entanglements). We confirm this behavior experimentally, in a set of
experiments that measure both the dilution exponent from linear rheology and the effective …