English

Helical structures from an isotropic homopolymer model

Soft Condensed Matter 2009-11-11 v1 Biomolecules

Abstract

We present Monte Carlo simulation results for square-well homopolymers at a series of bond lengths. Although the model contains only isotropic pairwise interactions, under appropriate conditions this system shows spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, where the chain exists in either a left- or a right-handed helical structure. We investigate how this behavior depends upon the ratio between bond length and monomer radius.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0605246,
  title  = {Helical structures from an isotropic homopolymer model},
  author = {James E. Magee and Victor R. Vasquez and Leo Lue},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0605246},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

10 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication by Physical Review Letters

R2 v1 2026-07-22T11:32:05.910Z