Related papers: Interplay between writhe and knotting for swollen …
Chromatin looping is a major epigenetic regulatory mechanism in higher eukaryotes. Besides its role in transcriptional regulation, chromatin loops have been proposed to play a pivotal role in the segregation of entire chromosomes. The…
We study numerically the tightness of prime flat knots in a model of self-attracting polymers with excluded volume. We find that these knots are localised in the high temperature swollen regime, but become delocalised in the low temperature…
Knots and knotted fields enrich physical phenomena ranging from DNA and molecular chemistry to the vortices of fluid flows and textures of ordered media. Liquid crystals provide an ideal setting for exploring such topological phenomena…
We study the statistics of branching polymers with excluded-volume interactions, by modeling them as single self-avoiding trees on a generic regular periodic lattice with coordination number $q$. Each lattice site can be occupied at most by…
The ropelength of a knot is the minimum length required to tie it. Computational upper bounds have previously been computed for every prime knot with up to 11 crossings. Here, we present ropelength measurements for the 2176 knots with 12…
Given a (genus 2) cube-with-holes M, i.e. the complement in S^3 of a handlebody H, we relate intrinsic properties of M (like its cut number) with extrinsic features depending on the way the handlebody H is knotted in S^3. Starting from a…
One of the most challenging problems in polymer physics is providing a theoretical description for the behaviour of rings in dense solutions and melts. Although it is nowadays well established that the overall size of a ring in these…
The self-avoid random walk algorithm has been extensively used in the study of polymers. In this work we study the basic properties of the trajectories generated with this algorithm when two interactions are added to it: contact and folding…
The linking number (topological entanglement) and the writhe (geometrical entanglement) of a model of circular double stranded DNA undergoing a thermal denaturation transition are investigated by Monte Carlo simulations. By allowing the…
Different types of ligands compete in binding to polymers with different consequences for the physical and chemical properties of the resulting complex. Here, we derive a general kinetic model for the competitive binding kinetics of…
Links of singularity and generalized algebraic links are ways of constructing three-manifolds and smooth links inside them from potentially singular complex algebraic surfaces and complex curves inside them. We prove that knot lattice…
We consider the problem of an inextensible but flexible fiber advected by a steady chaotic flow, and ask the simple question whether the fiber can spontaneously knot itself. Using a 1D Cosserat model, a simple local viscous drag model and…
The advent of solid state nanodevices allows for interrogating the physico-chemical properties of a polyelectrolyte chain by electrophoretically driving it through a nanopore. Salient dynamical aspects of the translocation process have been…
The manner in which continuum center vortices generate topological charge density is elucidated using an explicit example. The example vortex world-surface contains one lone self-intersection point, which contributes a quantum 1/2 to the…
Polymers are an effective test-bed for studying topological constraints in condensed matter due to a wide array of synthetically-available chain topologies. When linear and ring polymers are blended together, emergent rheological properties…
Vortex stretching is a common feature of many complex flows, including turbulence. Experiments and simulations of isolated vortex knots demonstrate that this behavior can also be seen in relatively simple systems, and appears to be…
We investigate how the dynamics of a single chain influences the kinetics of early stage phase separation in a symmetric binary polymer mixture. We consider quenches from the disordered phase into the region of spinodal instability. On a…
We study knots in $\mathbb{S}^3$ obtained by the intersection of a minimal surface in $\mathbb{R}^4$ with a small 3-sphere centered at a branch point. We construct examples of new minimal knots. In particular we show the existence of…
The most tight conformations of prime knots are found with the use of the SONO algorithm. Their curvature and torsion profiles are calculated. Symmetry of the knots is analysed. Connections with the physics of polymers are discussed.
We use complete enumeration and Monte Carlo techniques to study two-dimensional self-avoiding polymer chains with quenched ``charges'' $\pm 1$. The interaction of charges at neighboring lattice sites is described by $q_i q_j$. We find that…