%0 Journal Article
%@ 0021-9606
%A Morrison, Greg
%A Thirumalai, D.
%D 2005
%F eprints:1813
%I American Institute of Physics
%J Journal of Chemical Physics 
%N 19
%P 194907
%T The shape of a flexible polymer in a cylindrical pore
%U http://eprints.imtlucca.it/1813/
%V 122
%X We calculate the mean end-to-end distance R of a self-avoiding polymer encapsulated in an infinitely long cylinder with radius D. A self-consistent perturbation theory is used to calculate R as a function of D for impenetrable hard walls and soft walls. In both cases, R obeys the predicted scaling behavior in the limit of large and small D. The crossover from the three-dimensional behavior (D→∞) to the fully stretched one-dimensional case (D→0) is nonmonotonic. The minimum value of R is found at D ∼ 0.46RF, where RF is the Flory radius of R at D→∞. The results for soft walls map onto the hard wall case with a larger cylinder radius.