| Abstract: | A new, more realistic optical model of a dilute polymer solution is used to calculate the intrinsic birefringence. A general formula is derived valid for an arbitrary equilibrium distribution function of particles in the system. Besides the contributions due to the polymer and solvent, the resulting relation for intrinsic birefringence also contains terms reflecting the effect of orientation of solvent surrounding the polymer chain and the contribution of optical interactions between polymer segments and molecules of solvent. A detailed discussion of the optical interactions in an isotropic solvent reveals that the problem may be transformed in the first approximation into that of interactions between excess dipoles; however, any separation of the macroform and microform effects has no theoretical justification. It is shown that the microform effect depends on a detailed optical model of the statistical segment, and this effect is calculated for two simple models. The expression suggested by Tsvetkov cannot be applied to a segment consisting of anisotropic monomers. |
