Download or read book Random Polymers written by Frank den Hollander and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-04-09 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Polymer chains that interact with themselves and/or with their environment are fascinating objects, displaying a range of interesting physical and chemical phenomena. The focus in this monograph is on the mathematical description of some of these phenomena, with particular emphasis on phase transitions as a function of interaction parameters, associated critical behavior and space-time scaling. Topics include: self-repellent polymers, self-attracting polymers, polymers interacting with interfaces, charged polymers, copolymers near linear or random selective interfaces, polymers interacting with random substrate and directed polymers in random environment. Different techniques are exposed, including the method of local times, large deviations, the lace expansion, generating functions, the method of excursions, ergodic theory, partial annealing estimates, coarse-graining techniques and martingales. Thus, this monograph offers a mathematical panorama of polymer chains, which even today holds plenty of challenges.