Berlin 2008 – scientific programme

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CPP: Fachverband Chemische Physik und Polymerphysik

CPP 25: Polyelectrolytes

CPP 25.4: Talk

Wednesday, February 27, 2008, 15:15–15:30, C 230

Challenging scaling laws of flexible polyelectrolyte solutions with effective renormalization concepts — •Stephan A. Baeurle¹ and Evgenij A. Nogovitsin² — ¹Institute of Physical & Theoretical Chemistry, University of Regensburg, D-93053 Regensburg, Germany — ²Institute of Solution Chemistry, Russian Academy of Sciences, 153045 Ivanovo, Russia

Recasting a many-particle problem in a field-theoretic formalism is nowadays a well-established theoretical tool used by scientists across a wide spectrum of research areas, ranging from polymer physics to molecular electronic structure theory. It has shown to provide useful results in many complex situations, where the physics of the system involves many degrees of freedom and a multitude of different length-scales, generally rendering its numerical treatment on a detailed level computationally intractable. To reduce the computational burden, field-theoretic methodologies usually take advantage of the mean field approximation, which is known to give reliable information about the system in the high concentration regime, where the interactions are highly screened. However, it is well-established that the ranges of interest in most technological applications, lie in the intermediate to low concentration regimes, where fluctuations beyond the mean field level of approximation become important and dominate the overall physical behavior. In this talk we introduce a new renormalized self-consistent field theory for flexible polyelectrolyte chains, in which the monomers interact via a pair potential of screened Coulomb type, and derive suitable thermodynamic expressions for all concentration regimes.