Thermal instability of thetrans-polyacetylene polaron

Abstract
The trans-polyacetylene polaron decays to a kink-antikink pair (because of the greater entropy of the latter state) at a temperature which vanishes as the length L of the chain goes to infinity, approximately as 1/lnL. For a typical length of L∼102103 Å, the corresponding temperature is 103102 K.