Field-theoretical approach to a dense polymer with an ideal binary mixture of clustering centers

Riccardo Fantoni and Kristian K. Müller-Nedebock

Phys. Rev. E 84, 011808 – Published 29 July 2011

Abstract

We propose a field-theoretical approach to a polymer system immersed in an ideal mixture of clustering centers. The system contains several species of these clustering centers with different functionality, each of which connects a fixed number segments of the chain to each other. The field theory is solved using the saddle point approximation and evaluated for dense polymer melts using the random phase approximation. We find a short-ranged effective intersegment interaction with strength dependent on the average segment density and discuss the structure factor within this approximation. We also determine the fractions of linkers of the different functionalities.