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Semi-flexible polymers in crowded environments exhibit complex dynamics thatplay a crucial role in various biological and material design processes. Basedon the classic reptation theory, it is generally believed that semiflexiblepolymers are trapped within static confinements. Here we demonstrate thatsemi-flexible polymers are indeed trapped in short-lived kinetic cages. We havedeveloped a novel scaling law for rotational diffusion through the examinationof the polymer network at the level of an individual nanofiber and quantify theonset of entanglement and entanglement itself by introducing an effective tubediameter. We also show that understanding these dynamics is critical forinterpreting the macroscopic behavior of such systems, as evidenced by ourmicro-rheology analysis. The insight from our study provides a rectifiedmicroscopic understanding of the dynamics of semi-flexible polymers in complexenvironments, yielding new principles to better understand the macroscopicbehavior of crowded systems, from biophysics to materials science.

Breaking the Reptation Trap: Escape Dynamics of Semi-Flexible Polymers in Crowded Networks