ABSTRACT
Polymers consist of very large molecules containing thousands or millions of atoms, with molecular weights of hundreds of thousands g/mol or more. They can be synthesized through polymerization or copolymerization reactions from a wide variety of monomers. These large molecules can have the simple topology of linear chains, most common for synthetic polymers, or they can be rings, helices, combs, stars, or large networks. A macroscopic piece of rubber, such as an automobile tire, is a network made of crosslinked polymer molecules; it can be regarded as a single molecule built from small monomer units, each unit containing tens to hundreds of atoms.
