Related papers: Mapping onto ideal chains overestimates self-entan…
A central paradigm of polymer physics states that chains in melts behave like random walks as intra- and interchain interactions effectively cancel each other out. Likewise, $\theta$-chains, i.e., chains at the transition from a swollen…
The viscous flow of polymer chains in dense melts is dominated by topological constraints whenever the single chain contour length, N, becomes larger than the characteristic scale Ne, defining comprehensively the macroscopic rheological…
A cornerstone of modern polymer physics is the `Flory ideality hypothesis' which states that a chain in a polymer melt adopts `ideal' random-walk-like conformations. Here we revisit theoretically and numerically this pivotal assumption and…
In this thesis we study in detail the self-intersection properties of Random Walks. Although notoriously hard to tackle, these properties are crucially related to the excluded-volume effect and other central features of real polymers. Our…
In thermally fluctuating long linear polymeric chain in solution, the ends come from time to time into a direct contact or a close vicinity of each other. At such an instance, the chain can be regarded as a closed one and thus will form a…
We use Monte Carlo simulations to study polymer melts consisting of fully flexible and moderately stiff chains in the bond fluctuation model at a volume fraction $0.5$. In order to reduce the local density fluctuations, we test a…
It is commonly accepted that in concentrated solutions or melts high-molecular weight polymers display random-walk conformational properties without long-range correlations between subsequent bonds. This absence of memory means, for…
We probe the character of knotting in open, confined polymers, assigning knot types to open curves by identifying their projections as virtual knots. In this sense, virtual knots are transitional, lying in between classical knot types,…
We study the interplay between entropy and topological constraints for a polymer chain in which sliding rings (slip-links) enforce pair contacts between monomers. These slip-links divide a closed ring polymer into a number of sub-loops…
We present a detailed study of the static and dynamic behavior of long semiflexible polymer chains in a melt. Starting from previously obtained fully equilibrated high molecular weight polymer melts [{\it Zhang et al.} ACS Macro Lett. 3,…
Modeling of polymer chains has received a lot of attention in mathematics. In fact, probabilistic models that naturally arise in statistical mechanics have been widely studied by mathematicians for the very challenging and novel problems…
This is a pedagogical review of the subject of linear polymers on deterministic finitely ramified fractals. For these, one can determine the critical properties exactly by real-space renormalization group technique. We show how this is used…
An analysis of extensive simulations of interacting self-avoiding polygons on cubic lattice shows that the frequencies of different knots realized in a random, collapsed polymer ring decrease as a negative power of the ranking order, and…
The work addresses the analogy between trivial knotting and excluded volume in looped polymer chains of moderate length, $N<N_0$, where the effects of knotting are small. A simple expression for the swelling seen in trivially knotted loops…
We argue that the mean crossing number of a random polymer configuration is simply a measure of opacity, without being closely related to entanglement as claimed by several authors. We present an easy way of estimating its asymptotic…
In this work, we present a simple and efficient generator of polymeric linear chains, based on a random self-avoiding walk process. The chains are generated using a discrete process of growth, in cubic networks and in a finite time, without…
The lectures review the state of affairs in modern branch of mathematical physics called probabilistic topology. In particular we consider the following problems: (i) We estimate the probability of a trivial knot formation on the lattice…
We examine entanglements using monomer contacts between pairs of chains in a Brownian-dynamics simulation of a polymer melt. A map of contact positions with respect to the contacting monomer numbers (i,j) shows clustering in small regions…
In this chapter we review the rich behavior of polymer chains embedded in a quenched random environment. We first consider the problem of a Gaussian chain free to move in a random potential with short-ranged correlations. We derive the…
We present a computer simulation study of the compact self-avoiding loops as regards their length and topological state. We use a Hamiltonian closed path on the cubic-shaped segment of a 3D cubic lattice as a model of a compact polymer. The…