Related papers: Knots are Generic Stable Phases in Semiflexible Po…
The ongoing effort to detect and characterize physical entanglement in biopolymers has so far established that knots are present in many globular proteins and also abound in viral DNA packaged inside bacteriophages. RNA molecules, on the…
We discuss the entropy of a circular polymer under a topological constraint. We call it the {\it topological entropy} of the polymer, in short. A ring polymer does not change its topology (knot type) under any thermal fluctuations. Through…
Through extensive numerical simulations we investigate the evolution of knotted and linked vortices in the FitzHugh-Nagumo model. On medium time scales, of the order of a hundred times the vortex rotation period, knots simultaneously…
Long, flexible physical filaments are naturally tangled and knotted, from macroscopic string down to long-chain molecules. The existence of knotting in a filament naturally affects its configuration and properties, and may be very stable or…
The freely rotating chain is one of the classic discrete models of a polymer in dilute solution. It consists of a broken line of N straight segments of fixed length such that the angle between adjacent segments is constant and the N-1…
The existence of stable links and knots is demonstrated in three-dimensional, bistable, chemical media. The reaction-diffusion medium segregates into regions of high and low concentration separated by sharp interfaces. The interfaces repel…
We investigate the effect of knot type on the properties of a ring polymer confined to a slit. For relatively wide slits, the more complex the knot, the more the force exerted by the polymer on the walls is decreased compared to an…
We study by Monte Carlo simulations and scaling analysis two models of pairs of confined and dense ring polymers in two dimensions. The pair of ring polymers are modelled by squared lattice polygons confined within a square cavity and they…
The non-equilibrium structural and dynamical properties of semiflexible polymers confined to two dimensions are investigated by molecular dynamics simulations. Three different scenarios are considered: The force-extension relation of…
We introduce a two-dimensional lattice model for the description of knotted polymer rings. A polymer configuration is modeled by a closed polygon drawn on the square diagonal lattice, with possible crossings describing pairs of strands of…
A veritable zoo of different knots is seen in the ensemble of looped polymer chains, whether created computationally or observed in vitro. At short loop lengths, the spectrum of knots is dominated by the trivial knot (unknot). The…
Motivated by recent advances in single molecule manipulation techniques that enabled several groups to tie knots in individual polymer strands and to monitor their dynamics, we have used computer simulations to study "friction knots"…
Systematic microcanonical inflection-point analysis of precise numerical results obtained in extensive generalized-ensemble Monte Carlo simulations reveals a bifurcation of the coil-globule transition line for polymers with a bending…
We have mapped the physics of a system of semi-flexible inextensible polymers onto a complex Ginzburg-Landau field theory using techniques of functional integration. It is shown in the limit of low number density of monomers in a melt of…
In this thesis we deal with the specific collective phenomena in condensed matter - striped-structures formation. Such structures are observed in different branches of condensed matter physics, like surface physics or physics of…
A theory is presented for the binding of small molecules such as surfactants to semiflexible polymers. The persistence length is assumed to be large compared to the monomer size but much smaller than the total chain length. Such polymers…
It has been revealed by mean-field theories and computer simulations that the nature of the collapse transition of a polymer is influenced by its bending stiffness $\epsilon_{\rm b}$. In two dimensions, a recent analytical work demonstrated…
We study the elasticity of fibrous materials composed of generalized stiff polymers. It is shown that in contrast to cellular foam-like structures affine strain fields are generically unstable. Instead, a subtle interplay between the…
We study a solution of interacting semiflexible polymers with curvature energy in poor-solvent conditions on the d-dimensional cubic lattice using mean-field theory and Monte Carlo computer simulations. Building upon past studies on a…
We present a braided circuit topology framework for investigating topology and structural phase transitions in aggregates of semiflexible polymers. In the conventional approach to circuit topology, which specifically applies to single…