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An important concept in the treatment of perturbations to polymer chain structure is that of a blob [?]. It describes a length scale below which the polymer chain may be considered to be unperturbed by other forces or effects, whether they are excluded volume effects, surface interactions or external forces of tension or compression. Since the entire chain is in a thermal bath, on some length scale, thermal energy becomes the overriding influence and thus at length scales below this, the polymer exhibits ideal behavior.
We divide the polymer chain into blobs of size ξ, with g monomers per blob. The size of the blob is described by ideal chain statistics, so ξ ≈ gb1∕2.
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