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Polymers in disordered environments

A brief review of our recent studies aiming at a better understanding of the scaling behaviour of polymers in disordered environments is given. The main emphasis is on a simple generic model where the polymers are represented by (interacting) self-avoiding walks and the disordered environment by critical percolation clusters. The scaling behaviour of the number of conformations and their average spatial extent as a function of the number of monomers and the associated critical exponents $γ$ and $ν$ are examined with two complementary approaches: numerical chain-growth computer simulations using the PERM algorithm and complete enumerations of all possible polymer conformations employing a recently developed very efficient exact counting method.