Teaching

Polymer Physics: An Introductory Course for Sissa PhD students (I year)

Syllabus:

1. Ideal polymers

   • Freely-rotating chain, freely-jointed chain, worm-like chain, Gaussian chain

   • Average properties: End-to-end distance & radius of gyration

   • End-to-end distribution function

2. Non-ideal polymer chains and excluded-volume effects

   • Phenomenological description of effective pairwise interactions

   • Flory theory & critical dimension

   • Polymers under spatial constraints: Pincus' blob argument

3. Polymer chain under stretching

   • Elastic & non-elastic behaviors

   • Pincus' blob argument

4. Thermodynamics of mixtures

   • Stability

   • Phase separation

5. Polymer dynamics

   • The Rouse model: Exact solution

   • The Rouse model: Scaling behavior

6. Polyelectrolytes

   • Flory theory, the Bjerrum length & critical dimension

   • Pincus' blob argument

   • Debye-Hückel theory

7. Notes on Monte Carlo methods in Polymer Physics

   • Simple sampling

   • Metropolis algorithm

   • Lattice and off-lattice models, description of common MC moves (crankshaft, pivot)

8. Notes on Molecular Dynamics methods in Polymer Physics

   • Langevin equation

   • Verlet algorithm

   • How to choose the right force field: the Kremer-Grest polymer model

References:

• • M. R. Rubinstein & R. H. Colby, Polymer Physics (Oxford University Press)

  • M. Doi & S. F. Edwards, The Theory of Polymer Dynamics (Oxford University Press)

  • A. Y. Grosberg & A. R. Khokhlov, Statistical Physics of Macromolecules (AIP Press)

  • The topics are inspired by the following lectures: Boulder School 2012: Polymers in Soft and Biological Matter