Prof. Paul Goldbart, Department of Physics, UT-Austin

"Torn Polymer Liquids - Using Tricks From the Quantum World to Understand Them"

Coffee and cookies will be served at 3:45pm in RLM 4.102

Abstract: The inability of polymer segments to pass through one another can have striking consequences: In good solvents isolated polymers swell; in concentrated solutions they entangle; in melts they reptate. But how to incorporate segment-segment impenetrability can be a challenge to theorists. In this talk we shall see that there are occasional settings in which progress can be made -- not by confronting polymer impenetrability directly but by interpreting conformations of classical polymers as worldlines of fictitious quantum particles, and then harnessing the Pauli exclusion principle to implement impenetrability. My aim is to give a pictorial introduction to such settings, introducing questions one might ask about of polymer liquids along with tricks from the quantum world that shed light on them. Our focus will primarily be on low-dimensional settings, where polymer interactions effects tend to be most acute and where, despite being liquids, certain polymer systems can nevertheless be torn.