Related papers: Mechanical unfolding of directed polymers in a poo…
We consider a directed walk model of a homopolymer (in two dimensions) which is self-interacting and can undergo a collapse transition, subject to an applied tensile force. We review and interpret all the results already in the literature…
In order to study long chain polymers many lattice models accommodate a pulling force applied to a particular part of the chain, often a free endpoint. This is in addition to well-studied features such as energetic interaction between the…
A statistical mechanical description of flexible and semi-flexible polymer chains in a poor solvent is developed in the constant force and constant distance ensembles. We predict the existence of many intermediate states at low temperatures…
Stretched polymers with attractive interaction are studied in two and three dimensions. They are described by biased self-avoiding random walks with nearest neighbour attraction. The bias corresponds to opposite forces applied to the first…
The nature of the theta point for a polymer in two dimensions has long been debated, with a variety of candidates put forward for the critical exponents. This includes those derived by Duplantier and Saleur (DS) for an exactly solvable…
The unfolding of a polymer below the $\theta$ point when pulled by an external force is studied both in d=2 on the lattice and in $d=3$ off lattice. A ground state analysis of finite length chains shows that the globule unfolds via multiple…
This is a pedagogical review of the subject of linear polymers on deterministic finitely ramified fractals. For these, one can determine the critical properties exactly by real-space renormalization group technique. We show how this is used…
We investigate polymers pulled away from an interacting surface, where the force is applied to the untethered endpoint and at an angle $\theta$ to the surface. We use the canonical self-avoiding walk model of polymers and obtain the phase…
We study the conformations of polymer chains in a poor solvent, with and without bending rigidity, by means of a simple statistical mechanics model. This model can be exactly solved for chains of length up to N=55 using exact enumeration…
Advanced chain-growth computer simulation methodologies have been employed for a systematic statistical analysis of the critical behavior of a polymer adsorbing at a substrate. We use finitesize scaling techniques to investigate the…
Self-avoiding walks are a simple and well-known model of long, flexible polymers in a good solvent. Polymers being pulled away from a surface by an external agent can be modelled with self-avoiding walks in a half-space, with a Boltzmann…
We study self-avoiding walks on the square lattice restricted to a square box of side $L$ weighted by a length fugacity without restriction of their end points. This models a confined polymer in dilute solution. The model admits a phase…
We investigate the phase diagram of disordered copolymers at the interface between two selective solvents, and in particular its weak-coupling behavior, encoded in the slope $m_c$ of the critical line at the origin. In mathematical terms,…
The interplay of nematic order and phase separation in solutions of semiflexible polymers in solvents of variable quality is investigated by density functional theory (DFT) and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. We studied coarse-grained…
We consider a one-dimensional directed polymer in a random potential which is characterized by the Gaussian statistics with the finite size local correlations. It is shown that the well-known Kardar's solution obtained originally for a…
We describe some recent results concerning the statistical properties of a self-interacting polymer stretched by an external force. We concentrate mainly on the cases of purely attractive or purely repulsive self-interactions, but our…
We solve a two dimensional model for polymer chain folding in the presence of mechanical pulling force ($f$) exactly using equilibrium statistical mechanics. Using analytically derived expression for the partition function we determine the…
Long linear polymers in dilute solutions are known to undergo a collapse transition from a random coil (expand itself) to a compact ball (fold itself up) when the temperature is lowered, or the solvent quality deteriorates. A natural model…
We study a directed polymer model in a random environment on infinite binary trees. The model is characterized by a phase transition depending on the inverse temperature. We concentrate on the asymptotics of the partition function in the…
On the 1+2 dimensional lattice, we consider a directed polymer in a random Gaussian environment that is independent in time and correlated in space. The spatial correlation is supposed to decay as $(\log |x|)^a /|x|^{2}$, $a>-1$, where the…