An illustration of scale invariance in polymers

Figure III.6 . Eight randomly sampled images of a long self-avoiding random-walk polymer. (We show self-avoiding polymers because simple random walk polymers are difficult to illustrate in two dimensions.) Half of the images are at a 2.5-fold magnification relative to the other half. The monomer positions are blurred to a fixed fraction of the picture size. In each case the picture was centered on a monomer. The two magnifications are interspersed randomly. The reader is invited to guess which are the magnified images. [Polymers were generated via a monte-carlo simulation and drawn by Olgica Bakajin, 1995] For the solution click here

...from a textbook in preparation: Introduction to Complex Fluids
by P. A. Pincus and T. A. Witten. To be published by Oxford University Press, USA.