Collection of Czechoslovak Chemical Communications - digital archive 

Abstract

It is shown that the formation of the so-called rotator phase of alkanes (one of the high temperature crystalline phases) might be connected with a partial increase of the conformational flexibility of chains. The conformations with higher number of kinks per chain, which have been neglected till now, are shown to contribute effectively to the conformational partition function. Small probability of these states given by the Boltzmann exponent is compensated by a large number of ways in which they can be distributed along the chain. The deduced features of the rotator phase seem to be in agreement with the experimentally observed properties.