Related papers: Entropic alignment of topologically modified ring …
Ring, or cyclic, polymers have unique properties compared to linear polymers, due to their topologically closed structure that has no beginning or end. Experimental measurements on molecular ring polymers are challenging due to their…
Polymer entanglements lead to complicated topological constraints and interactions between neighbouring chains in a dense solution or melt. Entanglements can be treated in a mean field approach, within the famous reptation model, since they…
The investigation of a dilute solution of phantom ideal ring polymers and ring polymers with excluded volume interactions (EVI) in a good solvent confined in a slit geometry of two parallel repulsive walls and in a solution of colloidal…
Rotors are common in nature - from rotating membrane-proteins to superfluid-vortices. Yet, little is known about the collective dynamics of heterogeneous populations of rotors. Here, we show experimentally, numerically, and analytically…
We study the effect of the crowded nature of the cellular cytoplasm on the translocation of a polymer through a pore in a membrane. By systematically treating the entropic penalty due to crowding, we show that the translocation dynamics are…
The conformational statistics of ring polymers in melts or dense solutions is strongly affected by their quenched microscopic topological state. The effect is particularly strong for non-concatenated unknotted rings, which are known to…
Topological entanglements in polymers are mimicked by sliding rings (slip-links) which enforce pair contacts between monomers. We study the force-extension curve for linear polymers in which slip-links create additional loops of variable…
Using canonical Monte Carlo simulations, we introduce a new numerical procedure for comparing the entropic exponents of polymers with different constraints and/or topologies. Setting up competitions between polymer segments which can…
Structure and dynamics of an active polymer on a smooth cylindrical surface are studied by Brownian dynamics simulations. The effect of active force on the polymer adsorption behavior and the combined effect of chain mobility, length N,…
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…
The self-avoid random walk algorithm has been extensively used in the study of polymers. In this work we study the basic properties of the trajectories generated with this algorithm when two interactions are added to it: contact and folding…
Polymer translocation in crowded environments is a ubiquitous phenomenon in biological systems. We studied polymer translocation through a pore in free, one-sided (asymmetric), and two-sided (symmetric) crowded environments. Extensive…
Extensive molecular simulations are applied to characterize the equilibrium dynamics, entanglement topology, and nonlinear extensional rheology of symmetric ring-linear polymer blends with systematically varied ring fraction $\phi_R$.…
Two ring polymers close to each other in space may be either in a segregated phase if there is a strong repulsion between monomers in the polymers, or intermingle in a mixed phase if there is a strong attractive force between the monomers.…
We present a novel mechanism for resolving the mechanical rigidity of nanoscopic circular polymers that flow in a complex environment. The emergence of a regime of negative differential mobility induced by topological interactions between…
We investigate interaction-induced corrections to entanglement entropy by mapping a screened Yukawa-type interaction to an effective harmonic oscillator system with controlled anharmonic perturbations. Starting from a one-dimensional…
Despite their considerable practical and biological applications, the link between molecular properties, assembly conditions and self-organized structure in confined polymer solutions remains elusive. Here, we explore the lyotropic nematic…
The interaction of amphiphilic polymers with small colloids, capable to reversibly stick onto the chains, is studied. Adhesive small colloids in solution are able to dynamically bind two polymer segments. This association leads to…
By means of extensive replica-exchange simulations of generic coarse-grained models for helical polymers, we systematically investigate the structural transitions into all possible helical phases for flexible and semiflexible elastic…
We present results from molecular dynamics simulations of a spherically confined neutral polymer in the presence of crowding agents, studying polymer shapes and conformations as a function of the confining potential, solvent quality and the…