The scaling behaviour of screened polyelectrolytes

We present a field-theoretic renormalization group (RG) analysis of a single flexible, screened polyelectrolyte chain (a Debye-Hückel chain) in a polar solvent. We point out that the Debye-Hückel chain may be mapped onto a local field theory which has the same fixed point as a generalised n → 1 Potts model. Systematic analysis of the field theory shows that the system is one with two interplaying length scales requiring the calculation of scaling functions as well as exponents to fully describe its physical behaviour. To illustrate this, we solve the RG equation and explicitly calculate the exponents and the mean end-to-end length of the chain.