Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mphil-in-micro-and-nanotechnology-enterprise-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2018/paper-1/section-a-iii/5/iv/solution

Interpret the stipulated model as a freely jointed chain with independent, isotropically oriented segments of length . With end-to-end vector , cross terms vanish on averaging:
Using only the model's supplied segment size and count gives
The mean vector is zero, not the mean magnitude. In the three-dimensional large- Gaussian chain limit,
Thus the common root-mean-square interpretation of an average chain size is , while the mean scalar distance is about . The contour length is a different quantity. A count of links between positions changes these estimates by less than .
These are results of the explicitly idealized statistical chain, not a prediction about the conformation or persistence length of an actual biological molecule. TODO (user-deferred biology): material-specific biological interpretation of that model.

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