Related papers: Knots in Charged Polymers
We analyze the interaction of two conducting, charged polymer chains in solution using a minimal model for their electronic degrees of freedom. We show that a crossing of the two chains in which the polymers pass within Angstroms of each…
In recent times some interesting field theoretical descriptions of the statistical mechanics of entangling polymers have been proposed by various authors. In these approaches, a single test polymer fluctuating in a background of static…
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…
Polymers with active segments constitute prospective future materials and are used as a model for some biological systems such as chromatin. The directions of the active forces are typically introduced with temporal or spatial correlations…
Understanding how topological constraints affect the dynamics of polymers in solution is at the basis of any polymer theory and it is particularly needed for melts of rings. These polymers fold as crumpled and space-filling objects and,…
By using the blob theory and computer simulations, we investigate the properties of a linear polymer performing a stationary rotational motion around a long impenetrable rod. In particular, in the simulations the rotation is induced by a…
Mixtures of polymers of varying topologies and stiffnesses display complex emergent rheological properties that often cannot be predicted from their single-component counterparts. For example, entangled blends of ring and linear polymers…
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,…
The low-energy physics of (quasi)degenerate one-dimensional systems is typically understood as the particle-like dynamics of kinks between stable, ordered structures. Such dynamics, we show, becomes highly non-trivial when the ground states…
We study by Monte Carlo simulations a model of knotted polymer ring adsorbing onto an impenetrable, attractive wall. The polymer is described by a self-avoiding polygon (SAP) on the cubic lattice. We find that the adsorption transition…
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…
We employ computer simulations and thermodynamic integration to analyse the effects of bending rigidity and slit confinement on the free energy cost of tying knots, $\Delta F_{\rm knotting}$, on polymer chains under tension. A…
This paper visualizes a knot reduction algorithm
Unconcatenated, unknotted polymer rings in the melt are subject to strong interactions with neighboring chains due to the presence of topological constraints. We study this by computer simulation using the bond-fluctuation algorithm for…
We investigate experimentally the distribution of configurations of a ring with an elementary topological constraint, a ``figure-8'' twist. Using vibrated granular chains, which permit controlled preparation and direct observation of such a…
We construct a tractable model to describe the rate at which a knotted polymer is ejected from a spherical capsid via a small pore. Knots are too large to fit through the pore and must reptate to the end of the polymer for ejection to…
We analyze static properties of a strongly confined semiflexible polymer, i.e. either trapped in a closed space or compressed by external forces, in an athermal solvent. Like a flexible polymer case, we can resort to an analogy with the…
We give two different, statistically consistent definitions of the length l of a prime knot tied into a polymer ring. In the good solvent regime the polymer is modelled by a self avoiding polygon of N steps on cubic lattice and l is the…
When injected through a contraction, high molecular weight polymer solutions exhibit a sharp increase of apparent viscosity which originates from stretching polymer chains above a critical extension rate. This chain stretching can also…
Chromatin looping is a major epigenetic regulatory mechanism in higher eukaryotes. Besides its role in transcriptional regulation, chromatin loops have been proposed to play a pivotal role in the segregation of entire chromosomes. The…