English

Stiffness of polymer chains

Statistical Mechanics 2007-05-23 v1

Abstract

A formula is derived for stiffness of a polymer chain in terms of the distribution function of end-to-end vectors. This relationship is applied to calculate the stiffness of Gaussian chains (neutral and carrying electric charges at the ends), chains modeled as self-avoiding random walks, as well as semi-flexible (worm-like and Dirac) chains. The effects of persistence length and Bjerrum's length on the chain stiffness are analyzed numerically. An explicit expression is developed for the radial distribution function of a chain with the maximum stiffness.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0407716,
  title  = {Stiffness of polymer chains},
  author = {A. D. Drozdov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0407716},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

21 pages, 6 figures