Viscoelastic properties of an isolated polymer chain with arbitrary flexibility, chain length and hydrodynamic interactions from 4-dimensional Dirac propagator

Kholodenko's theory of semiflexible polymer chains, the conformation and pr operties of which are obtained from the Dirac propagator, shows applicabili ty to dilute solutions of semiflexible polymers of arbitrary persistence an d contour lengths by calculating the static scattering function and the squ ared end-to-end distance of the polymer chain. In the present work, the the ory is extended and applied to obtain the intrinsic viscosity with consider ation of hydrodynamic interactions. The intrinsic viscosity formula is deri ved as function of chain length and persistence length. The hydrodynamic in teractions are also taken into account following the Kirkwood and Riseman s cheme. From this calculation, we obtain the general expression for the intr insic viscosity and diffusion coefficients covering the whole range of chai n flexibilities without confusion with the excluded volume effects. Calcula ted limiting values of hydrodynamical observables are in complete agreement with those known for random coils and rigid rods.