paper

Stiffness of polymer chains

arXiv:cond-mat/0407716

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.

21 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (5)