POLYELECTROLYTE MOLECULE IN AN ELONGATIONAL FLOW

The theory describing the stretching of a weakly charged polyelectroly te molecule by elongational shear flow is developed. It is shown that for a polyelectrolyte immersed in a salt-added solution two critical v alues of shear flow gradient exist: the lower critical point correspon ds to the chain stretching on the scale of superblobs of size equal to the Debye screening length and the upper critical point corresponds t o the complete stretching of the chain on the scale of monomer units.