Abstract
The conformations of single polymer chains in solution have been studied extensively since the 1940s. At high temperatures and in good solvents, a polymer has an extended coil configuration, while at low temperatures and in poor solvents a polymer is in a collapsed globule state. The transition between the extended and collapsed state as the temperature or solvent composition is varied was thought to be smooth and continuous, and experiments supported this idea1. However, in the 1960s it was suggested2–4 that the transition between the two configurations, the coil–globule transition, was discrete. We now report the first observations of the single polymer coil–globule transition. The observations were made on polyacrylamide molecules dissolved in acetone–water mixtures.
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Nishio, I., Sun, ST., Swislow, G. et al. First observation of the coil–globule transition in a single polymer chain. Nature 281, 208–209 (1979). https://doi.org/10.1038/281208a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/281208a0
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