A Monte Carlo study of excluded volume effects in wormlike micelles and semiflexible polymers

An off-lattice pseudocontinuous model for semiflexible polymerlike micelles with excluded volume interactions is presented. Expansion factors are determined for the radius of gyration squared and for three different characteristic point-point distances squared. They are found to scale with an exponent in agreement with renormalization-group results and with previous lattice simulations. A comparison with the Yamakawa-Stockmayer-Shimada theory gives a reduced binary cluster integral B = 0.30 for the micelles which is similar to the value for polystyrene (PS) in a good solvent. We present an approach for simultaneously analyzing the point-point distance distribution functions and obtaining the characteristic parameters of these. Scattering functions are determined and used for analyzing small-angle neutron scattering data from PS in a good solvent.