Excluded-volume polymer-induced depletion interaction between parallel flat plates

The interaction between two parallel plates due to non-adsorbing polymer chains with excluded volume is calculated using the adsorption method. The adsorption is calculated from the profile of the polymer segment concentration between the plates, which is obtained from the product function of the concentration profile near a single wall, involving the correlation length. The renormalization group theory provides expressions for the osmotic pressure and consequently for the osmotic compressibility, chemical potential and correlation length of a polymer solution. Both the local polymer concentration profiles as well as the minimum of the interaction potential between the plates agree with recently published self-avoiding random walk computer simulations. Received 9 August 2001