Group theory,Markov chains,and excluded volume effect in polymers

A restricted walk of orderr on a lattice is defined as a random walk in which polygons withr vertices or less are excluded. A study of restricted walks for increasingr provides an understanding of how the transition in properties is effected from random to self-avoiding walks which is important in our understanding of the excluded volume effect in polymers and in the study of many other problems. Here the properties of restricted walks are studied by the transition matrix method based on the theory of Markov chains. A group theoretical method is used to reduce the transition matrix governing the walk in a systematic manner and to classify the eigenvalues of the transition matrix according to the various representations of the appropriate group. It is shown that only those eigenvalues corresponding to two particular representations of the group contribute to the correlations among the steps of the walk. The distributions of eigenvalues for walks of various ordersr on the two-dimensional triangular lattice and the three-dimensional face-centered cubic lattice are presented, and they are shown to have some remarkable features.