Conformational properties of bottle-brush polymers.
General and renormalized perturbation theories are used to study the conformational properties of a bottle-brush molecule, composed of multiarmed polymer stars grafted regularly onto a flexible backbone. The end-to-end distances of the backbone and of an arm of the middle star are calculated within the first order of perturbation theory. For the high grafting densities of stars, the calculated expressions are generalized with the help of the scaling arguments to give the equivalent power laws. According to these laws, the molecule may adopt a sequence of three different conformations (star-rod-coil) as the length of the backbone grows.
Denesyuk
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Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, Lensfield Road, Cambridge CB2 1EW, United Kingdom. nad28@cam.ac.uk