New Renormalization Group Results for Scaling of Self-Avoiding Tethered Membranes

The scaling properties of self-avoiding polymerized 2-dimensional membranes are studied via renormalization group methods based on a multilocal operator product expansion. The renormalization group functions are calculated to second order. This yields the scaling exponent nu to order epsilon^2. Our extrapolations for nu agree with the Gaussian variational estimate for large space dimension d and are close to the Flory estimate for d=3. The interplay between self-avoidance and rigidity at small d is briefly discussed.