Flory exponents from a self-consistent renormalization group

(Received 7 April 1993, accepted 3 June 1993)

Abstract
The wandering exponent for an isotropic polymer is predicted remarkably well by a simple argument due to Flory. By considering oriented polymers living in a one-parameter family of background tangent fields, we are able to relate the wandering exponent to the exponent in the background field through an -expansion. We then choose the background field to have the same correlations as the individual polymer, thus self-consistently solving for . We find for d < 4 and for , which is exactly the Flory result.