Related papers: Bending stiff charged polymers: the electrostatic …
The persistence length of a single, strongly charged, stiff polyelectrolyte chain is investigated theoretically. Path integral formulation is used to obtain the effective electrostatic interaction between the monomers. We find significant…
The response of a semiflexible polyelectrolyte chain to stretching in the regimes of moderate and weak screening is studied theoretically, with a special focus on DNA experiments. By using the nonlinear Poisson--Boltzmann description of…
The persistence length of a single, intrinsically rigid polyelectrolyte chain, above the Manning condensation threshold is investigated theoretically in presence of added salt. Using a loop expansion method, the partition function is…
We reconsider the electrostatic contribution to the persistence length, $\ell_e$, of a single, infinitely long charged polymer in the presence of screening. A Gaussian variational method is employed, taking $\ell_e$ as the only variational…
We use large scale Monte Carlo simulations to test scaling theories for the electrostatic persistence length $l_e$ of isolated, uniformly charged polymers with \DH intrachain interactions in the limit where the screening length…
While analyzing the persistence length of DNA atomistic simulations Wu et al. [J. Chem. Phys. 142, 125103 (2015)] introduced an empirical formula to account for the observed length-dependence. In particular they found that the persistence…
We report on a study of the shape of a stiff, charged rod that is subjected to equal and opposite force couples at its two ends. Unlike a neutral elastic rod, which forms a constant curvature configuration under such influences, the charged…
The mechanical properties of molecules are today captured by single molecule manipulation experiments, so that polymer features are tested at a nanometric scale. Yet devising mathematical models to get further insight beyond the commonly…
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…
Monte Carlo simulations and variational calculations using a Gaussian ansatz are applied to a model consisting of a flexible linear polyelectrolyte chain as well as to an intrinsically stiff chain with up to 1000 charged monomers. Addition…
DNA stretching experiments are usually interpreted using the worm-like chain model; the persistence length A appearing in the model is then interpreted as the elastic stiffness of the double helix. In fact the persistence length obtained by…
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…
We investigate the electrostatic contribution to the persistence length of a semiflexible polymer chain whose segments interact via a screened Debye-H\" uckel dipolar interaction potential. We derive the expressions for the renormalized…
Finding a theoretical formula for the persistence length of polyelectrolytes for the whole experimental range of salt concentration is a long standing challenge. Using the Tethered Particle Motion technique, the double-stranded DNA…
Brownian motion and viscoelasticity of semiflexible polymers is a subject that has been studied for many years. Still, rigorous analysis has been hindered due to the difficulty in handling the constraint that polymer chains cannot be…
To study the elastic properties of rod-like DNA nanostructures, we perform long simulations of these structure using the oxDNA coarse-grained model. By analysing the fluctuations in these trajectories we obtain estimates of the bend and…
A formula is derived for stiffness of a polymer chain in terms of the distribution function of end-to-end vectors. This relationship is applied to calculate the stiffness of Gaussian chains (neutral and carrying electric charges at the…
We investigate the sedimentation equilibrium of a charge stabilized colloidal suspension in the regime of low ionic strength. We analyze the asymptotic behaviour of the density profiles on the basis of a simple Poisson--Boltzmann theory and…
The effective elasticity of highly charged stiff polyelectrolytes is studied in the presence of counterions, with and without added salt. The rigid polymer conformations may become unstable due to an effective attraction induced by…
We address the long standing problem of the dependence of the electrostatic persistence length $l_e$ of a flexible polyelectrolyte (PE) on the screening length $r_s$ of the solution within the linear Debye-Huckel theory. The standard Odijk,…