Polymers in a vacuum

Abstract

In a variety of situations, isolated polymer molecules are found in a vacuum and here we examine their properties. Angular momentum conservation is shown to significantly alter the average size of a chain and its conservation is only broken slowly by thermal radiation. The time autocorrelation for monomer position oscillates with a characteristic time proportional to chain length. The oscillations and damping are analyzed in detail. Short range repulsive interactions suppress oscillations and speed up relaxation but stretched chains still show damped oscillatory time correlations.