Coil-globule transition of a single short polymer chain: An exact enumeration study

Abstract

The authors present an exact enumeration study of short self-avoiding walks in two as well as in three dimensions that addresses the question, "what is the shortest walk for which the existence of all the three scaling regimes--coil, globule, and the theta--could be demonstrated." Even though they could easily demonstrate the coil and the globule phase from free energy considerations, they could demonstrate the existence of a theta temperature only by using a scaling form for the distribution of gyration radius. That even such short walks have a scaling behavior is an unexpected result of this work.