Related papers: Spontaneous dimensional reduction and novel ground…
Phase diagram of the ground states of DNA in a bad solvent is studied for a semi-flexible polymer model with a generalized local elastic bending potential characterized by a nonlinearity parameter $x$ and effective self-attraction promoting…
We present the results of a quantitative study of the phase behavior of a model polymer chain with side spheres using two independent computer simulation techniques. We find that the mere addition of side spheres results in key…
Molecular dynamics simulation methods are used to study the folding of polymer chains into packed cubic states. The polymer model, based on a chain of linked sites moving in the continuum, includes both excluded volume and torsional…
Chain molecules play important roles in industry and in living cells. Our focus here is on distinct ways of modeling the stiffness inherent in a chain molecule. We consider three types of stiffnesses -- one yielding an energy penalty for…
Molecular process of polymer collapse was reproduced by isothermal molecular dynamics simulation. The initial polymer chains were obtained by mean of random walks in continuum space. Two potential models were considered to represent short…
The phase structure of a homopolymer chain is investigated in terms of a universal theoretical model, designed to describe the infrared limit of slow spatial variations. The effects of chirality are studied and compared with the influence…
Molecular dynamics simulations are used to study structure formation in simple model polymer chains that are subject to excluded volume and torsional interactions. The changing conformations exhibited by chains of different lengths under…
We propose and solve a simple model describing secondary structure formation in random hetero-polymers. It describes monomers with a combination of one-dimensional short-range interactions (representing steric forces and hydrogen bonds) and…
Motivated by the problem of domain formation in chromosomes, we studied a co--polymer model where only a subset of the monomers feel attractive interactions. These monomers are displaced randomly from a regularly-spaced pattern, thus…
The state space of a polymer molecule is analysed. We show how the size of the state space can be reduced on the basis of symmetry. In the reduced state space, the probability of a new state (termed below as class) is equal to the number of…
We have performed parallel tempering Monte Carlo simulations using a simple continuum heteropolymer model for proteins. All ten heteropolymer sequences which we have studied have shown first-order transitions at low temperature to ordered…
In this work we investigate structural properties of native states of a simple model for short flexible homopolymers, where the steric influence of monomeric side chains is effectively introduced by a thickness constraint. This geometric…
A model for a monolayer of two types of particles spontaneously forming ordered patterns is studied by a mesoscopic theory and by MC simulations. We assume hard-cores of the same size for both components, short-range attraction long-range…
Polymer chains undergoing a continuous adsorption-desorption transition are studied through extensive computer simulations. A three-dimensional self-avoiding walk lattice model of a polymer chain grafted onto a surface has been treated for…
We propose an off-lattice model for a self-avoiding homopolymer chain with two different competing attractive interactions, mimicking the hydrophobic effect and the hydrogen bond formation respectively. By means of Monte Carlo simulations,…
Phase separation within polymer networks plays a central role in shaping the structure and mechanics of both synthetic materials and living cells, including the formation of biomolecular condensates within cytoskeletal networks. Previous…
The possibility of Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking in momentum space in a generic Lifshitz scalar model - a non-relativistic scalar field theory with higher spatial derivative terms - has been studied. We show that the minimum energy state,…
While stretching of most polymer chains leads to rather featureless force-extension diagrams, some, notably DNA, exhibit non-trivial behavior with a distinct plateau region. Here we propose a unified theory that connects force-extension…
A simple model of a circularly closed dsDNA in a poor solvent is considered as an example of a semi-flexible polymer with self-attraction. To find the ground states, the conformational energy is computed as a sum of the bending and…
We apply the computational methodology of phase retrieval to the problem of folding heteropolymers. The ground state fold of the polymer is defined by the intersection of two sets in the configuration space of its constituent monomers: a…