Crystallization of polyethylene melt

This is work of Richard Gee and Naida Lacevic at LLNL to study the onset of polymer crystallization via spinodal phase separation. The image (left) shows a snapshot of the polyethylene (PE) melt with an ordered polymer domain in a fringed micelle-like morphology. The movie (right) is a brief animation of the ordering transition from a large simulation of 5832 PE chains each with 768 monomers (4.5M united atoms), run for 45 nanoseconds.