Scaling Description of Charged Polymers

Abstract

The series of 3 lectures that I gave in Les Houches was meant to be an introduction to scaling methods applied to polyelectrolytes they were divided into three main sections: a general introduction on the conformation of polyelectrolyte chains in (mostly dilute) solutions, a discussion of the behavior of polyelectrolytes close to surfaces and a presentation of more recent results on problems where charge fluctuations are important such as polyampholytes or polyelectrolyte complexes. In these lecture notes, I will skip completely the section on interfaces which is covered by a recent review [1] and I will emphasize the general introduction on the scaling description of polyelectrolyte chains [2]; the last section will give a brief summary on the properties of polyampholytes and polyelectrolyte complexes.