Professor Benjamin Widom is funded by a grant from The Theoretical and Computational Chemistry Program to perform theoretical and experimental studies of phase-separated dilute high-polymer solutions, particularly the structure and polymer conformation at the interface. This fundamental theoretical research will lead to an improved understanding of the properties of polymer solutions, and their dependence on the molecular properties of the polymers which comprise them. The theoretical model used for these studies has been shown by Widom to be equivalent to the Ising-spin model with many-body and further-neighbor interactions. The proposed studies of this lattice microemulsion model will emphasize generalized amphiphile-amphiphile interactions, unsymmetrical states, and the correlation, structure, and scattering functions. The theoretical studies of these solutions will be directed toward obtaining the interfacial structure, including the spatial dependence of the polymer-chain geometry in the interface.
