Fig. 4: True stress, tie segments, entanglements, crystallinity and folds as a function of true strain during tensile testing for multi-domain PE crystals in x (black), y (red) and z (blue) directions.

Panels (a–c) correspond to systems with either 0, 10 or 20 branches respectively. The two different deformation rates 10⁴s⁻¹ (fast) and 10³s⁻¹ (slow) are distinguished by the solid and pastel colours and inset arrows. Note \({\sigma }_{{\rm{t}}}^{({\rm{peak}})}\), Δ_tie and SIC correspond to peak true stress, the change in number of tie chains from their peak to plateau after failure and strain induced crystallisation.