Linear and branched polymers on fractals

Deepak Dhar, Yashwant Singh

Published 2005-08-15Version 1

This is a pedagogical review of the subject of linear polymers on deterministic finitely ramified fractals. For these, one can determine the critical properties exactly by real-space renormalization group technique. We show how this is used to determine the critical exponents of self-avoiding walks on different fractals. The behavior of critical exponents for the $n$-simplex lattice in the limit of large $n$ is determined. We study self-avoiding walks when the fractal dimension of the underlying lattice is just below 2. We then consider the case of linear polymers with attractive interactions, which on some fractals leads to a collapse transition. The fractals also provide a setting where the adsorption of a linear chain near on attractive substrate surface and the zipping-unzipping transition of two mutually interacting chains can be studied analytically. We also discuss briefly the critical properties of branched polymers on fractals.