The radius of a self-repelling star polymer

Abstract

We study the effective radius of weakly self-avoiding star polymers in one, two, and three dimensions. Our model includes $N$ Brownian motions up to time $T$, started at the origin and subject to exponential penalization based on the amount of time they spend close to each other, or close to themselves. The effective radius measures the typical distance from the origin. Our main result gives estimates for the effective radius where in two and three dimensions we impose the restriction that $T \leq N$. One of the highlights of our results is that in two dimensions, we find that the radius is proportional to $T^{3/4}$, up to logarithmic corrections. Our result may shed light on the well-known conjecture that for a single self-avoiding random walk in two dimensions, the end-to-end distance up to time $T$ is roughly $T^{3/4}$.