 Philip Alan Pincus

Philip Alan Pincus studies the statistical mechanics of polymers. His 1976 scaling argument explains why a long flexible polymer in a good solvent becomes a nonlinear spring when stretched far beyond its equilibrium size. Stretching suppresses the conformations favored by entropy, while excluded volume prevents the chain behaving like an ideal random walk. In the three-dimensional scaling approximation used in that paper, the restoring force grows as the extension to the power $3/2$, within the strong-extension regime before the chain approaches its full contour length. Thus a weak-extension Hooke's law cannot simply be extrapolated to large extensions.^[ref]

Institutional publication list: mrlweb.mrl.ucsb.edu/~pincus/