Chain conformation of ionomers in a nonpolar solvent

We consider the conformation of ionomers that carry metallic groups at each monomer site. This metallic group forms a point dipole in a nonpolar solvent. In the presence of a strong electric field, the dipoles are expected to align themselves in the direction of the external field. In this limit, the exact renormalization-group method yields the relation between the end-to-end distance R and the chain length N as R=$N^{\nu }$ with ν=2/d for 2≤d<4. The chain is thus fully stretched in two dimensions. A modified Flory theory also yields the same result. The relevance of our results to experiments is also discussed.