Ideal Chain - Entropic Elasticity of An Ideal Chain

Entropic Elasticity of An Ideal Chain

If the two free ends of an ideal chain are attached to some kind of micro-manipulation device, then the device experiences a force exerted by the polymer. The ideal chain's energy is constant, and thus its time-average, the internal energy, is also constant, which means that this force necessarily stems from a purely entropic effect.

This entropic force is very similar to the pressure experienced by the walls of a box containing an ideal gas. The internal energy of an ideal gas depends only on its temperature, and not on the volume of its containing box, so it is not an energy effect that tends to increase the volume of the box like gas pressure does. This implies that the pressure of an ideal gas has a purely entropic origin.

What is the microscopic origin of such an entropic force or pressure? The most general answer is that the effect of thermal fluctuations tends to bring a thermodynamic system toward a macroscopic state that corresponds to a maximum in the number of microscopic states (or micro-states) that are compatible with this macroscopic state. In other words, thermal fluctuations tend to bring a system toward its macroscopic state of maximum entropy.

What does this mean in the case of the ideal chain? First, for our ideal chain, a microscopic state is characterized by the superposition of the states of each individual monomer (with i varying from 1 to N). In its solvent, the ideal chain is constantly subject to shocks from moving solvent molecules, and each of these shocks sends the system from its current microscopic state to another, very similar microscopic state. For an ideal polymer, as will be shown below, there are more microscopic states compatible with a short end-to-end distance than there are microscopic states compatible with a large end-to-end distance. Thus, for an ideal chain, maximizing its entropy means reducing the distance between its two free ends. Consequently, a force that tends to collapse the chain is exerted by the ideal chain between its two free ends.

In this section, the mean of this force will be derived. The generality of the expression obtained at the thermodynamic limit will then be discussed.