Critical Phenomena of Single and Double Polymer Strands in a Solution

A universality class describing the statistics of the merging of two single polymer strands to a double polymer strand and the reverse process is examined. The polymers can have an intrinsic direction, and the simpler case, where only single strands aligned parallel bind to a double strand is considered in detail. The critical dimension of the universality class is six, there is a stable fixed point and critical exponents are calculated with renormalization group and loop expansion. The corresponding field theory describes polymer configurations in terms of fields and not in terms of coordinate paths and is second quantized in this sense.