English

Probability distributions for polymer translocation

Statistical Mechanics 2009-02-12 v1

Abstract

We study the passage (translocation) of a self-avoiding polymer through a membrane pore in two dimensions. In particular, we numerically measure the probability distribution Q(T) of the translocation time T, and the distribution P(s,t) of the translocation coordinate s at various times t. When scaled with the mean translocation time <T>, Q(T) becomes independent of polymer length, and decays exponentially for large T. The probability P(s,t) is well described by a Gaussian at short times, with a variance that grows sub-diffusively as t^{\alpha} with \alpha~0.8. For times exceeding <T>, P(s,t) of the polymers that have not yet finished their translocation has a non-trivial stable shape.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0805.4168,
  title  = {Probability distributions for polymer translocation},
  author = {Clément Chatelain and Yacov Kantor and Mehran Kardar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0805.4168},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

5 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:44:38.084Z