ON A REMARKABLE CLASS OF TWO-DIMENSIONAL RANDOM-WALKS

This study describes some properties of random walks in a plane which differ from free random walks through an extra weightfactor (-1) for every crossing of some branchline T. The statistical distribution of these walks is derived, asymptotically for very long walks, in the case that T consists of a half-line. It is pointed out that these walks are relevant to (1) self-avoiding random walks in a plane; (2) the simple entanglement problem in polymer physics. © 1980 American Institute of Physics.