Conformational properties of regular comb polymers

Abstract

Regular comb polymers with excluded volume interactions are studied and compared with regular star and linear polymers. First-order calculations in the excluded volume parameter, at the critical dimensionality d=4, yield the characteristic exponents of the macroscopic properties to order epsilon =4-d. The number of total configurations and the number of configurations with the backbone forming a ring are found. The evaluation of the mean end-to-end square distances of the backbone and the branches give an insight to the spatial distribution of the macromolecule.