Swelling of the various parts of a polymer chain in a good solvent

Abstract

We consider an isolated polymer chain in a good solvent and calculate the swelling of an arbitrary part of it. We show that this swelling is much more important in the central part of the chain, and decreases abruptly when one reaches one of its extremities. We give the expressions of the averages of all the powers of the distance between two arbitrary points of the chain, at first order in e = 4 - d, d being the space dimension. Critical indices are deduced from it.