On the excluded volume of neighbor‐avoiding lattice walks

Like real polymer chains and unlike self‐avoiding lattice walks, neighbor‐avoiding lattice walks exhibit a reduction or mediation of the effective excluded‐volume interaction, and thus merit study as a model of real polymers. For small excluded volume, we extend the perturbation series of Domb and Joyce to neighbor‐avoiding walks. For large excluded volume we compute exactly the excluded volume per lattice site for short chains and estimate it by Monte Carlo for longer chains. We discuss the significance of chain stiffness for lattice models and suggest how the correct two‐parameter function might be determined numerically.