A picture of dilute solution behavior of polymers through polyelectrolyte simulation

A Monte Carlo (MC) study is made of the persistence length q and the binary cluster integral β (or the excluded-volume strength B) for polyelectrolytes by the use of the discrete Kratky-Porod wormlike chain with hard-core-effective Debye-Hückel electrostatic pair potentials. The quantity q is determined from the initial decay rate of the bond correlation function after preliminary confirmation of the validity of this procedure using the chain with Lennard-Jones pair potentials. The quantity B is determined from the mean-square radius of gyration along with q by the use of the quasi-two-parameter (QTP) excluded-volume theory. They are evaluated for two model cases of polyelectrolytes, sodium hyaluronate as an example of semiflexible polymers and poly(sodium 4-styrenesulfonate) as a typical example of flexible polymers, both in aqueous sodium chloride. The behavior of MC data so obtained for q and B as functions of added salt concentration c is examined in detail, comparing them with the Odijk-Skolnick-Fixman theory of q and the Fixman-Skolnick (FS) theory of B and also with literature experimental data. In particular, the MC values of B are in almost complete agreement with the FS theory for large c, although the latter still overestimates B somewhat for small c. The values of B themselves and also the validity of the QTP theory in general are discussed in comparison with the case of nonionic polymers.