Related papers: Polyelectrolyte Knot Delocalization Induced by Cou…
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…
The interplay of topological constraints and Coulomb interactions in static and dynamic properties of charged polymers is investigated by numerical simulations and scaling arguments. In the absence of screening, the long-range interaction…
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…
We investigate the collapse kinetics of charged polymers (polyelectrolytes) induced by counterion condensation using coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations. Under good solvent conditions, polyelectrolytes above the critical charge…
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…
A new quantitative theory for polyelectrolytes in salt free dilute solutions is developed. Depending on the electrostatic interaction strength, polyelectrolytes in solutions can undergo strong stretching (with polyelectrolyte dimension…
Molecular dynamics simulations are used to study the local dynamics of counterion-charged polymer association at charge densities above and below the counterion condensation threshold. Surprisingly, the counterions form weakly-interacting…
Many experiments have been done to determine the relative strength of different knots, and these show that the break in a knotted rope almost invariably occurs at a point just outside the `entrance' to the knot. The influence of knots on…
We present results of molecular dynamics simulations of strong, flexible polyelectrolyte chains in solution with added salt. The effect of added salt on the polyelectrolyte chain structure is fully treated for the first time as a function…
The collapse kinetics of strongly charged polyelectrolytes in poor solvents is investigated by Langevin simulations and scaling arguments. The rate of collapse increases sharply as the valence of counterions, z, increases from one to four.…
We study the bending rigidity of highly charged stiff polyelectrolytes, for both a single chain and many chains forming a bundle. A theory is developed to account for the interplay between competitive binding of counterions and charge…
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…
Spontaneous formation of knots in long polymers at equilibrium is inevitable but becomes rare in sufficiently short chains. Here, we show that knotting and knot complexity increase by orders of magnitude in diblock polymers with a fraction…
The advent of solid state nanodevices allows for interrogating the physico-chemical properties of a polyelectrolyte chain by electrophoretically driving it through a nanopore. Salient dynamical aspects of the translocation process have been…
Light scattering and viscometric measurements on weak polyelectrolytes show two important aspects of counterion condensation, namely, non-monotonic variation in the polyelectrolyte size with the increase in the electrostatic strength, and,…
We study numerically the tightness of prime flat knots in a model of self-attracting polymers with excluded volume. We find that these knots are localised in the high temperature swollen regime, but become delocalised in the low temperature…
The mechanical properties of polymer knots under stretching in a bad or good solvent are investigated by applying a given force $F$ to a point of the knot while keeping another point fixed. The Monte Carlo sampling of the polymer…
Stretching dynamics of polymers in microfluidics is of particular interest for polymer scientists. As a charged polymer, a polyelectrolyte can be deformed from its coiled equilibrium configuration to an extended chain by applying uniform or…
Polyelectrolytes in poor solvents show a necklace structure where collapsed polymer pearls are linked to stretched strings. In the present paper the elasticity of such chains is studied in detail. Different deformation regimes are…
An extensive study of single block copolymer knots containing two kinds of monomers $A$ and $B$ is presented. The knots are in a solution and their monomers are subjected to short range interactions that can be attractive or repulsive. In…