title: Polymers in a vacuum.
abstract: In a variety of situations, isolated polymer molecules are found in a vacuum, and here we examine their properties. Angular momentum conservation is shown to significantly alter the average size of a chain and its conservation is only broken slowly by thermal radiation. For an ideal chain, the time autocorrelation for monomer position oscillates with a period proportional to chain length. The oscillations and damping are analyzed in detail. Short-range repulsive interactions suppress oscillations and speed up relaxation, but stretched chains still show damped oscillatory correlations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz, California 95064, USA.
authors.forename: J M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Deutsch
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D004247:DNA / Q000737:chemistry; D008956:Models, Chemical; D011108:Polymers / Q000737:chemistry*; D014618:Vacuum
chemical_list: D011108:Polymers; D004247:DNA