Confined polymers in the extended de Gennes regime.

We show that the problem of describing the conformations of a semiflexible polymer confined to a channel can be mapped onto an exactly solvable model in the so-called extended de Gennes regime. This regime (where the polymer is neither weakly nor strongly confined) has recently been intensively studied experimentally and by means of computer simulations. The exact solution predicts precisely how the conformational fluctuations depend upon the channel width and upon the microscopic parameters characterizing the physical properties of the polymer.