title: A functional-integral formulation for polymer colloids: Pagonabarraga-Cates free energy revisited.
abstract: We have formulated a new functional-integral representation with respect to both polymer and monomer densities, along the lines of the current picture treating polymers as soft colloids. Comparison between the resulting form and a model free energy functional of Pagonabarraga and Cates (PC 2001 Europhys. Lett. 55 348) indicates that the PC relation between monomer and polymer concentrations is to be modified, and that further insertion of the order parameter defined by the square of monomer density is indispensable for regularizing a divergent term absent in the PC functional. Moreover, the saddle-point approximation to our functional integral leads to a self-consistent equation which efficiently preincludes the minimum of the Flory-Huggins-type local free energy as input.
authors.affiliation: Soft Matter Laboratory, Kochi University of Technology, Tosa-Yamada, Kochi 782-8502, Japan.
authors.forename: Hiroshi
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Frusawa