We study the tubular phase of self-avoiding anisotropic membranes. We discuss the renormalizability of the model Hamiltonian describing this phase and derive from a renor-malization group equation some general scaling relations for the exponents of the model. We show how particular choices of renormalization factors reproduce the Gaussian result, the Flory theory and the Gaussian Variational tr...

Biosafety of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and their derivatives is still a major topic in the agenda of government and societies worldwide. The aim of this review is to bring into light that data that supported the decision taken back in 1998 as an exercise to stimulate criticism from the scientific community for upcoming discussions and to avoid emotional and senseless arguments that ...

We report on recent progress in understanding the tubular phase of self-avoiding anisotropic membranes. After an introduction to the problem, we sketch the renormalization group arguments and symmetry considerations that lead us to the most plausible fixed point structure of the model. We then employ an ε-expansion about the upper critical dimension to extrapolate to the physical interesting 3-...

Combining the FH entropy of mixing and the standard RS enthalpy of mixing yields the FH solution theory for polymers: ∆G N = Bφ1φ2 + RT (φ1 lnφ1 + φ2 N lnφ2). As written above, this equation is comparable to the free energy of mixing from the Regular Solution Model. Notice that the expressions differ in two ways: first, FH is cast in volume fractions rather than mole fractions, and second, FH i...

We re-explore the kinetics of spinodal decomposition in off-critical polymer blends through numerical simulations of the Cahn-Hilliard equation with the Flory-Huggins-De Gennes free energy functional. Even in the absence of thermal noise, the solution of the discretized equation of motion shows coarsening in the late stages of spinodal decomposition without evidence of pinning, regardless of th...

We study the tubular phase of self-avoiding anisotropic membranes. We discuss the renormalizability of the model Hamiltonian describing this phase and derive from a renor-malization group equation some general scaling relations for the exponents of the model. We show how particular choices of renormalization factors reproduce the Gaussian result, the Flory theory and the Gaussian Variational tr...

2014 Self-avoiding walks (SAW) explore the backbone of a fractal lattice, while random walks explore the full lattice. We show the existence of an intrinsic exponent for SAW and examine a simple Flory approximation that uses the spectral dimension of the backbone. Exact results for various fractal lattices show that this approximation is not very satisfactory and that properties of SAW depend o...