Randomly charged polymers in porous environment

TL;DR

This paper investigates how charged polymers, specifically polyampholytes, behave in porous environments with power-law correlated obstacles, using renormalization group techniques to analyze their scaling properties.

Contribution

It introduces a model of polyampholytes in porous media with correlated obstacles and applies renormalization group analysis to determine their conformational scaling behavior.

Findings

Charged polymers exhibit altered scaling in porous environments.

Power-law correlations in obstacles significantly influence polymer conformations.

First-order epsilon-delta expansion provides insights into the scaling regimes.

Abstract

We study the conformational properties of charged polymers in a solvent in the presence of structural obstacles correlated according to a power law $\sim x^{-a}$. We work within the continuous representation of a model of linear chain considered as a random sequence of charges $q_i=\pm q_0$. Such a model captures the properties of polyampholytes -- heteropolymers comprising both positively and negatively charged monomers. We apply the direct polymer renormalization scheme and analyze the scaling behavior of charged polymers up to the first order of an $\epsilon=6-d$, $\delta=4-a$-expansion.