The physics of floppy polymers
W.C.K. Poon, David Andelman · 2006
The title of this chapter obviously deserves some explanation. The development of classical polymer physics can be traced perhaps to the ready availability of synthetic polymers in the early part of the 20th century, such as polyethylene, polystyrene, nylon, etc. Pioneers such as Staudinger, Kuhn, and especially Flory, led the way in proposing theories and models to understand the experimentally measured properties of these polymers. These synthetic polymers are essentially oppy objects. Their properties are largely determined by the fact that they have a huge number of possible conformations. Thus, rubber elasticity, rheology (ow behaviour) and so on are determined by entropy, in other words, changes in the number of conformations accessible to the chains.