English

Universal properties of knotted polymer rings

Statistical Mechanics 2013-01-21 v1 Soft Condensed Matter

Abstract

By performing Monte Carlo sampling of NN-steps self-avoiding polygons embedded on different Bravais lattices we explore the robustness of universality in the entropic, metric and geometrical properties of knotted polymer rings. In particular, by simulating polygons with NN up to 10510^5 we furnish a sharp estimate of the asymptotic values of the knot probability ratios and show their independence on the lattice type. This universal feature was previously suggested although with different estimates of the asymptotic values. In addition we show that the scaling behavior of the mean squared radius of gyration of polygons depends on their knot type only through its correction to scaling. Finally, as a measure of the geometrical self-entanglement of the SAPs we consider the standard deviation of the writhe distribution and estimate its power-law behavior in the large NN limit. The estimates of the power exponent do depend neither on the lattice nor on the knot type, strongly supporting an extension of the universality property to some features of the geometrical entanglement.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1209.2607,
  title  = {Universal properties of knotted polymer rings},
  author = {Marco Baiesi and Enzo Orlandini},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1209.2607},
  year   = {2013}
}

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submitted to Phys.Rev.E