Polymer physics covers all the physical aspects of macromolecular substances. If we introduced the subject according to the current classifications of structures and properties of polymers, the textbook would become thicker and thicker with the fast expansion of our knowledge and would look like an encyclopedia. Such a textbook cannot meet the current demand for a more concise introduction within a time limited schedule of university courses on polymer-related subjects.
In fact, the published textbooks on polymer physics normally selected the content according to the author’s personal taste or to the specific training subjects. On the other hand, nowadays on the Internet, fragmental concepts of polymer physics are available.
However, the students still need the course training on the intrinsic correlations among meaningful physical concepts of polymers as well as the useful theoretical tools for a fundamental analysis.
On the basis of the above challenges, this book is intended to provide a concise entrance-level introduction on polymer physics. It tries to avoid the complicated mathematic treatments of modern theories, the trivial experimental techniques, the details of practical industrial processing, and the wide applications of polymers. Rather, the attention is only focused on three basic aspects of comprehensive principles of polymer physics, including molecular structures, molecular motions, and phase transitions, in order to elaborate the basic statistical thermodynamics and kinetics (the mean-field theory and the scaling analysis) as well as their state-of-the-art applications.
The book may help readers to establish several key molecular-level pictures of polymer physics. The book targets senior undergraduate students, graduate students, teachers, and researchers, who are studying and working in the extensive fields of physical sciences, life sciences, materials sciences, and engineering sciences relevant to physical aspects of polymers.
Through a systematic study, the readers are expected to grasp the basic concepts of polymer physics as well as the theoretical tools for a fundamental analysis of macromolecules.
The current English edition was basically translated from its recent Chinese version (Science Publisher in Beijing, 2011), with minor expansion on the historical aspects of some fundamental ideas and their original references. After the introductory chapter, the book has been split into three parts: chain structures, chai motions, and chain assembly.
The first part introduces the relationships between chemical structures of polymers and their physical behaviors, the Gaussian statistics of ideal-chain conformation, the derivation of the equation of state for ideal rubbers, as well as the scaling analysis of some non-ideal-chain conformations (polymer solutions, polyelectrolyte, stretching, and spatial confinement).
The second part introduces the scaling analysis of chain dynamics, the relaxation behaviors of polymer deformation, and the viscoelastic behaviors of polymer flows.
The third part introduces polymer assembly via phase transitions, which includes the statistical thermodynamics of polymer solutions (Flory-Huggins mean-field lattice theory and its developments), phase separation (its thermodynamics and kinetics; in addition, microphase separation of block copolymers), and polymer crystallization (thermodynamics, kinetics, and morphologies).
The book ends with an extended reading material on the interplay of phase separation and crystallization in polymer based multi-component systems. Each chapter is complemented at the end with several question sets to highlight some basic ideas.
The delivery of this English edition was decided in a nice conversation with Dr. Stephen Soehnlen, the Springer editor. Prof. Daan Frenkel offered a perfect foreword. Prof. Yifu Ding and Dr. Ran Ni made a thorough proofreading over the original text, and Prof. An-Chang Shi and Dr. Jamie Hobbs made separate proofreading on the first and second chapters. With their great help, the present book became more readable as a textbook!
The content of this book is limited by the author’s academic background as well as by the pedagogic style of a textbook. It could not completely cover all the important academic ideas in the related fields or all the original references in the historical aspects.
The author is mainly responsible for any mistakes in the text. Friendly suggestions and comments are always most welcome.
