Polymers

It is well known that the conformation properties of long flexible polymer chains in a good solvent are governed by power laws (scaling laws). The seek for the form of these laws lead not only to the creation of modern theoretical physics and chemistry of polymers, but also enabled to discover a deep connection between the physics of critical phenomena and the physics of macromolecules. In our studies, we are interested in how do these laws change for polymers of complex topology (e.g. for polymer stars and networks) [1,2], how do they change under an influence of a structural disorder (e.g. for polymers in a porous medium) [3-5], how does polymer composition influence the form of these laws [1]. Our results find application in description of various physical, chemical, biological phenomena where these laws are manifested. These in particular include description of phase diagrams of complex polymers, diffusion-limited catalysis and trapping reactions, multifractality of interacting random and self-avoiding walks [2], transport properties of proteins in crowded environment of biological cells. Some of our results and perspectives of future studies may be found in [1-5].

  1. C. von Ferber, Yu. Holovatch. Copolymer networks and stars: scaling exponents. Phys. Rev. E, vol.56, pp.6370-6386 (1997). abstract, ps

  2. C. von Ferber, Yu. Holovatch. Multifractality of Brownian motion near absorbing polymers. Phys. Rev E,  vol. 59, pp. 6914 - 6923 (1999) abstract, ps

  3. C. von Ferber, V. Blavats'ka, R. Folk, Yu. Holovatch.  Where two fractals meet: The scaling of a self-avoiding walk on a percolation cluster. Phys. Rev. E,  vol. 70 (2004) 035104(R). abstract, ps

  4. V. Blavats'ka, C. von Ferber, R. Folk, Yu. Holovatch.   Renormalization group approaches to polymers in disordered media. in: "Statistics of Linear Polymers in Disordered Media", Ed. by Bikas K. Chakrabarti (Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2005) pp.103-148  book description

  5. V. Blavats'ka, C. von Ferber, Yu. Holovatch.   Entropy-induced separation of star polymers in porous media. Phys. Rev. E, vol. 74 (2006) 031801. abstract, ps

    Last updated March 12, 2010.