Branched polymer models

Abstract

The importance of excluded volume in determinig the sizes of branched polymers is discussed in terms of several models. First, the branched chain analog of the rotational isomeric model is solved and gives improvement over earlier random flight models but, as was the case for linear chains, the asymptotic dependence of polymer size on monomer number (〈size〉≂ANν) remains the same, except that model differences are found in the preexponential factor A. Next, a hierarchy of subclasses of the full class of generally branched self-avoiding random walks is briefly described and compared to our recent Monte Carlo results on the full problem. Finally, simple heuristic arguments for excluded volume corrections are considered.