Correlation Spectroscopy and Structural Properties of Macromolecular Solutions

Abstract

In this communication we shall speak about some results concerning the investigation of structural properties in macromolecular solutions, as well as in fused salts in which polymerization occurs. The present results are a part of many experimental investigations carried out in liquids, liquid solutions and so on. The interest in the field of macromolecular solutions is twofold: a macromolecular solution can be treated as a “model”, the large size of molecules allowing the use of light scattering instead of X rays or neutrons. On the other hand structural properties of solutions of macromolecules of biological interest can be interesting in themselves, because of a possible connection between structure and biological function. We report the results obtained by using light scattering in two systems, each being characterized by some sort of local order. The first one consists of solutions of macromolecules (both B.S.A. and lysozyme), in which a long-range order seems to occur. The second one is a melted salt (antimony trichloride) in which polymerization takes place. In the first case a main role is played by water itself, which is a strongly — associated liquid because of the existence of hydrogen bonds. In the second-case, chlorine bonds allow the polymerization of the liquid. We use both elastic and quasi-elastic light scattering. we also investigate the coherence properties of the scattered light. A summary of the published papers in this field is reported in the bibliography^{1, 2, 3}.