Related papers: Confinement of knotted polymers in a slit
Polymers in a melt may be subject to topological constraints, as in the example of unlinked polymer rings. How to do statistical mechanics in the presence of such constraints remains a fundamental open problem. We study the effect of…
Using Monte Carlo simulation, we analyse the behaviour of two-dimensional hard rods in four different types of geometric confinement: (i) a slit pore where the particles are confined between two parallel walls with homeotropic anchoring;…
We investigate the mechanical properties of amorphous polymers by means of coarse-grained simulations and nonaffine lattice dynamics theory. A small increase of polymer chain bending stiffness leads first to softening of the material, while…
Entanglement of polymer chains is ubiquitous in elastomers, gels, and biological tissues. While the effects of chain entanglement on elasticity and viscoelasticity of polymer networks have been intensively studied, it remains elusive how…
In this review we provide an organized summary of the theoretical and computational results which are available for polymers subject to spatial or topological constraints. Because of the interdisciplinary character of the topic, we provide…
We present a novel phenomenological theory describing how topological constraints in prime-knot ring polymers induce collective (cooperative) modes of motion. In low-complexity knots, chain segments can move quasi-independently. However, as…
Polymer solutions subject to pressure driven flow and in nanoscale slit pores are systematically investigated using the dissipative particle dynamics approach. We investigated the effect of molecular weight, polymer concentration and flow…
The properties of semiflexible polymers tethered by one end to an impenetrable wall and exposed to oscillatory shear flow are investigated by mesoscale simulations. A polymer, confined in two dimensions, is described by a linear bead-spring…
We present results from molecular dynamics simulations of a spherically confined neutral polymer in the presence of crowding agents, studying polymer shapes and conformations as a function of the confining potential, solvent quality and the…
The longitudinal response of single semiflexible polymers to sudden changes in externally applied forces is known to be controlled by the propagation and relaxation of backbone tension. Under many experimental circumstances, realized, e.g.,…
Hydrodynamic interactions as modeled by Multi-Particle Collision Dynamics can dramatically influence the dynamics of fully flexible, ring-shaped polymers in ways not known for any other polymer architecture or topology. We show that steady…
The size of a zero thickness (no excluded volume) polymer ring is shown to scale with chain length $N$ in the same way as the size of the excluded volume (self-avoiding) linear polymer, as $N^{\nu}$, where $\nu \approx 0.588$. The…
We investigate the statistical mechanics of a torsionally constrained polymer. The polymer is modeled as a fluctuating rod with bend stiffness A kT and twist stiffness C kT. In such a model, thermal bend fluctuations couple geometrically to…
The work in this article is inspired by a classical problem: the statistical physical properties of a closed polymer loop that is wound around a rod. Historically the preserved topology of this system has been addressed through…
Nanoscale and microscale confinement of biopolymers naturally occurs in cells and has been recently achieved in artificial structures designed for nanotechnological applications. Here, we present an extensive theoretical investigation of…
Simulations are used to examine the microscopic origins of strain hardening in polymer glasses. While traditional entropic network models can be fit to the total stress, their underlying assumptions are inconsistent with simulation results.…
Inspired by how certain proteins "sense" knots and entanglements in DNA molecules, here we ask if there exist local geometric features that may be used as a read-out of the underlying topology of generic polymers. We perform molecular…
The non-linear stress-strain relation for crosslinked polymer networks is studied using molecular dynamics simulations. Previously we demonstrated the importance of trapped entanglements in determining the elastic and relaxational…
Single-chain elasticity is of fundamental importance in polymer physics, as it underlies many of the unique properties of polymer systems. Recently, there has been interest in characterizing the elastic properties of catenanes, molecular…
We study the influence of some quenched disorder in the sequence of monomers on the entropic elasticity of long polymeric chains. Starting from the Kratky-Porod model, we show numerically that some randomness in the favoured angles between…