Related papers: Disordered, stretched, and semiflexible biopolymer…
A statistical mechanical description of flexible and semi-flexible polymer chains in a poor solvent is developed in the constant force and constant distance ensembles. We predict the existence of many intermediate states at low temperatures…
Motivated by the observation of the storage of excess elastic free energy - (prestress) -- in cross linked semiflexible networks, we consider the problem of the conformational statistics of a single semiflexible polymer in a quenched random…
Heterogeneity in biological molecules, resulting in molecule-to-molecule variations in their dynamics and function, is an emerging theme. To elucidate the consequences of heterogeneous behavior at the single molecule level, we propose an…
We study the dynamical properties of semiflexible polymers with a recently introduced bead-spring model. We focus on double-stranded DNA. The two parameters of the model, $T^*$ and $\nu$, are chosen to match its experimental force-extension…
We consider the rupture dynamics of a homopolymer chain pulled at one end at a constant loading rate. Our model of the breakable polymer is related to the Rouse chain, with the only difference that the interaction between the monomers is…
The persistence length of semiflexible polymers and one-dimensional fluid membranes is obtained from the renormalization of their bending rigidity. The renormalized bending rigidity is calculated using an exact real-space functional…
The effect of ambient disorders and sequence heterogeneities on the reptation of a long polymer is studied with the aid of a disordered tube model. The dynamics of a random heteropolymer is found to be much slower than that of a homopolymer…
We investigate the copolymerization behavior of a two-component system into quasi-linear self-assemblies under conditions that interspecies binding is favored over identical species binding. The theoretical framework is based on a…
We present a numerical solution of the Worm-Like Chain (WLC) model for semi-flexible polymers. We display graphs for the end-to-end distance distribution and the force-extension relation expected from the model. We predict the expected…
Previous research on semiflexible polymers including cytoskeletal networks in cells has suggested the existence of distinct regimes of elastic response, in which the strain field is either uniform (affine) or non-uniform (non-affine) under…
The electronic properties of macromolecular semiconductor thin films depend profoundly on their solid-state microstructure, which in turn is governed, among other things, by the processing conditions selected and the polymer chemical nature…
Through extensive Monte Carlo simulations, we systematically study the effect of chain stiffness on the packing ability of linear polymers composed of hard spheres in extremely confined monolayers, corresponding effectively to 2D films.…
Biological polymers, such as intrinsically disordered proteins, play a central role in cellular biology, including mediating phase separation and controlling activity of biological condensates. The physical properties and functions of…
We explore the elastic behavior of a wormlike chain under compression in terms of exact solutions for the associated probability densities. Strikingly, the probability density for the end-to-end distance projected along the applied force…
We discuss simulations of a simple model for polymer blends in the framework of the Rouse model. At odds with standard predictions, large dynamic asymmetry between the two components induces strong non-exponentiality of the Rouse modes for…
We consider directed semiflexible polymers embedded in a fluctuating surface which is governed by either surface tension or bending rigidity. The attractive interactions induced by the fluctuations of the surface reduce the rigidity of the…
This work justifies the paradigmatic importance of viscoelastic subdiffusion in random environments for cellular biological systems. This model displays several remarkable features, which makes it an attractive paradigm to explain the…
We investigate theoretically the effect of polymer tension on the collective behavior of reversibly binding cross-links. For this purpose, we employ a model of two weakly bending wormlike chains aligned in parallel by a tensile force, with…
Stretched polymers with attractive interaction are studied in two and three dimensions. They are described by biased self-avoiding random walks with nearest neighbour attraction. The bias corresponds to opposite forces applied to the first…
Elastomeric materials display a complicated set of stretchability and fracture properties that strongly depend on the flaw size, which has long been of interest to engineers and materials scientists. Here, we combine experiments and…