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Abstract
We consider an arbitrarily charged polymer driven by a weak electric field through a gel. The orientation of these polymers can be derived from a central model in which only the head is charged. The orientation displays characteristic bulk and tail behaviour. The form of the scaling laws are derived and the scaling functions have been determined numerically. The paper deals with the physical mechanisms of the orientation profile near the tail of the polymer and clarifies why mean field approximations utterly fail in understanding the dynamics of long polymers.
Acknowledgements
This work has been supported by the Polish Science Committee (KBN) through Grant No. 2 P03B 125 24. AD wants to thank CELTAM (Center for Low Temperature Studies of Promising Materials for Applications) in Poland for financing his research visit at Leiden.
Notes
This convention differs from previous papers, where N is the number of reptons. Since the N links are the basic variables, we have decided to break with this unnatural tradition.