THE CONFORMATION OF CONDUCTING POLYMER-CHAINS - HUBBARD POLYMERS

The conformational and electronic properties of conducting flexible ra ndom and self-avoiding polymer chains are under investigation. A Hamil tonian for conjugated flexible polymers is introduced and its physical consequences are presented. One important result is that the electron ic degrees of freedom greatly affect the conformational statistics of the walks and vice versa. The electronic degrees of freedom extend the size of the chain. The end-to-end distance behaves as R alpha L(upsil on) with upsilon = (d + 1)/(d + 2), where d is the spatial dimension.