= Philip Alan Pincus
{c}
{tag=Physicist}
<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.<Excluded Volume Effects and Stretched Polymer Chains by Philip Alan Pincus>[pp. 386–388, abstract and scaling argument for strongly elongated chains]{ref}
Institutional publication list: https://mrlweb.mrl.ucsb.edu/~pincus/
\Image[https://engineering.ucsb.edu/sites/default/files/styles/people_thumb_small/public/people/images/Pincus%20Phil.jpg?c=7d80b70944cd0f52a7fc33ab4c97457c&itok=C-2hvrkc]
{title=Portrait of <Philip Alan Pincus>}
{description=External portrait hosted by University of California, Santa Barbara.}
{source=https://engineering.ucsb.edu/people/philip-pincus}
{width=260}
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