Scaling of entropic shear rigidity.

The scaling of shear modulus near the gelation-vulcanization transition is explored heuristically and analytically. It is found that in a dense melt the effective chains of the infinite cluster have sizes that scale sublinearly with their contour length. Consequently, each chain contributes k(B)T to the rigidity, which leads to a shear-modulus exponent dnu. In contrast, in phantom elastic networks the scaling is linear in the contour length, yielding an exponent identical to that of the random resistor network conductivity, as predicted by de Gennes. For nondense systems, the exponent should cross over to dnu when the percolation correlation length is much larger than the density-fluctuation length.