Lectures: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4-5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 26

Phases of Polymers

1. Interactions:
   • Excluded Volume; Role of Solvent (Lecture Notes, Page 1 (GIF))
   • Mean-field Estimate of the Partition Function (Lecture Notes, Page 2 (GIF))
2. Swollen (Coil) Phase in Good Solvents:
   • Flory Exponent
   • Scaling Behavior, Fractal Dimension (Lecture Notes, Page 3 (GIF))
3. Compact (Globular) Phase in Poor Solvents:
   • Polymer Collapse, Theta-point
   • Thermodynamic Behavior at the Transition; Reduction in Entropy (Lecture Notes, Page 4 (GIF))
4. Frozen (Folded) State of Heteropolymers:
   • The Random Energy Model (REM) (Lecture Notes, Page 5 (GIF))
   • The Freezing Transition and Associated Singularities (Lecture Notes, Page 6 (GIF))
   • Designed REM as a Model Protein (Lecture Notes, Page 7 (GIF))