ON A REMARK OF DE GENNES CONCERNING THREE-DIMENSIONAL POLYELECTROLYTES

This work is inspired by a remark of de Gennes [3] about polyelectrolytes, which are charged polymers. A common model for a polymer is a self-avoiding or self-repelling random walk or Brownian motion. For polyelectrolytes, the repelling potential is the Coulomb potential arising from pairs of charged particles. We show that in the continuous case of a Brownian motion in three dimensions, the spread of the polymer, in particular the radius of gyration of a polyelectrolyte of length T grows linearly with T, up to logarithmic corrections.