Three-dimensional entropic chain stiffness Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-18
A three-dimensional ideal chain of independent segments of length has . The isotropic small-force susceptibility gives , so . For a long worm-like chain, the statistical segment is . This stiffness describes entropic end-to-end extension, not axial stretching of the material backbone, whose spring constant is .
Two-dimensional Flory approximation 2026-10-20
For a planar polymer with segments of length , approximate its coil free energy by . The first term is the entropic stretching cost of an ideal chain, while is an excluded-area coefficient. Minimizing gives and size exponent . For , this becomes . A parameter multiplying must carry area units; using an unsquared segment length there would be dimensionally inconsistent.