Suppression of excluded-volume exponents in shear flow of dilute polymer solutions

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Abstract
The analogy between polymer and binary critical fluid dynamics in simple shear flow is used to construct a renormalization-group analysis of the scaling exponent ν for the end-to-end distance of an isolated long polymer chain in a good solvent undergoing strong shear flow. The shear flow induces a crossover from the usual fixed point with the good solvent Flory exponent ν to a new, strong shear fixed point with the classical exponent ν=(1/2. Based on the blob picture we argue that the dynamic exponent z is not affected by the flow and remains at its zero shear, z=3 value. Experimentally observable consequences of this result are also discussed.