Costantino Creton: Acetate plays a big role in chain association, but can you measure the relaxation times of these systems? Could you perform these experiments while keeping the same polymer and polymer concentration and changing the solvent?
Answer: It is possible to obtain the terminal relaxation time of the system from the flow curves if the chains are long enough (M > 100 kg/mol). See, for instance, Figs. 4 and 5, as well as the supplementary material. Remarkably, for the systems in water, exhibiting a broad transition between the Newtonian and the shear thinning regimes, the estimation of the terminal relaxation time is subject to error, and an ad hoc analysis was performed and reported in the supplementary material.
We did compare water and dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) solutions at identical polymer concentrations. See Figs. 4 and 5 in the main text and Figs. S1 and S2 in the supplementary material....
