ABSTRACT
A large amount of the research work in the field of electro-optics is aimed at the relationship between the molecular structure and the net electrical parameters of a molecule. When a polymer solution or a melt is placed in an external static electric field, the polymer molecules involved are oriented and, in some instances, deformed by the action of the field on the permanent and induced dipole moments of the molecules. In turn, specific electric birefringence (EB) of many rigid-chain polymers was found experimentally to be dependent on the molecular weight because increase in the polymer chain length is accompanied by the changes in electric or optical anisotropy of the molecules, which are responsible for the EB effect. In frames of Kratky–Porod’ persistent chain model, the model of a chain of continuous curvature, he proposed to consider a behaviour of the macromolecules in solution under an electric field as that of macro-molecules in a frozen conformation.
