Correction-to-scaling exponents and amplitudes for the correlation length of linear polymers in two dimensions

Abstract

The authors consider the scaling behavior of the radius of gyration for a system of dilute linear polymers. They focus on rho _N, the mean-square end-to-end distance of an N-step self-avoiding walk for which an additional two terms were recently calculated for the close-packed triangular lattice. Combining several extrapolation methods, they find that a consistent description of the scaling behaviour exists if and only if the correction-to-scaling exponent Delta is roughly half as large as commonly believed. They conclude that all data are consistent with the equation rho _N=AN^{2 nu} (1+B/N^Delta +C/N) where nu =³/₄, Delta equivalent to ²/₃, A equivalent to 1/ square root 2, AB equivalent to 0.21 and C-1.