The current theoretical belief is that the steady-state shear banding in viscoelastic liquids requires a non-monotonic constitutive relationship between shear stress and shear rate. Although existing rheological studies conclude that the constitutive equation for entangled polymers is monotonic, recent experimental evidence suggests shear banding can nevertheless occur in polymer solutions. In this work, we predict, for the first time, steady state shear banding with a realistic monotonic constitutive theory for polymeric liquids. The key is that a proper account must be taken of the coupling of polymer stress to polymer concentration. We also predict multiple steady states at some shear rates as seen experimentally, with shear banding if the flow is ramped quickly enough from rest, but homogeneous linear shear flow otherwise.

We present several developments that facilitate the efficient field-theoretic simulation of polymers by complex Langevin sampling. A regularization scheme using finite Gaussian excluded volume interactions is used to derive a polymer solution model that appears free of ultraviolet divergences and hence is well-suited for lattice-discretized field theoretic simulation. We show that such models can exhibit ultraviolet sensitivity, a numerical pathology that dramatically increases sampling error in the continuum lattice limit, and further show that this pathology can be eliminated by appropriate model reformulation by variable transformation. We present an exponential time differencing algorithm for integrating complex Langevin equations for field theoretic simulation, and show that the algorithm exhibits excellent accuracy and stability properties for our regularized polymer model. These developments collectively enable substantially more efficient field-theoretic simulation of polymers, and illustrate the importance of simultaneously addressing analytical and numerical pathologies when implementing such computations.

We present a formalism for the systematic numerical coarse-graining of field-theoretic models of fluids that draws upon techniques from both the Monte Carlo renormalization group and particle-based coarse-graining literature. A force-matching technique initially developed for coarse-graining particle-based interaction potentials is adapted to calculate renormalized field-theoretic coupling coefficients in a complex-valued field theory, and a related method is introduced for coarse-graining field-theoretic operators. The viability of this methodology is demonstrated by coarse-graining a field-theoretic model of a Gaussian-core fluid and thereby reducing lattice discretization errors.

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We introduce a stable and efficient complex Langevin (CL) scheme to enable the first direct numerical simulations of the coherent-states (CS) formulation of polymer field theory. In contrast with Edwards' well-known auxiliary-field (AF) framework, the CS formulation does not contain an embedded nonlinear, non-local, implicit functional of the auxiliary fields, and the action of the field theory has a fully explicit, semi-local and finite-order polynomial character. In the context of a polymer solution model, we demonstrate that the new CS-CL dynamical scheme for sampling fluctuations in the space of coherent states yields results in good agreement with now-standard AF-CL simulations. The formalism is potentially applicable to a broad range of polymer architectures and may facilitate systematic generation of trial actions for use in coarse-graining and numerical renormalization-group studies.