Münster 1997 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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PO: Polymerphysik

PO 3: Poster: Kolloide und Polyelektrolyte

PO 3.10: Poster

Montag, 17. März 1997, 15:30–17:30, Gg

Critical behaviour of screened polyelectrolytes — •Michael Stapper and Tanniemola Liverpool — Max-Planck-Institut fuer Polymerforschung, Postfach 3148, 55021 Mainz.

We present a field-theoretic renormalization group (RG) analysis of a single flexible, screened polyelectrolyte chain (a Debye-Hückel chain) in a polar solvent. We first show that the Debye-Hückel chain may be mapped onto a local field theory which describes a generalised n→1 Potts model. A systematic analysis of the resulting field theory shows that the system is one with two length-scales requiring the calculation of scaling functions as well as exponents to fully describe its physical behaviour. This means that great care must be taken in considering the interplay of the length-scales leading to unphysical results if the wrong limits are taken. To illustrate this, we solve the RG equation and explicitly calculate the exponents and the mean end-to-end length of the chain.

T.B. Liverpool and M. Stapper, submitted (1996).