Related papers: Dynamics of polymer chain collapse into compact st…
Processes on different length scales affect the dynamics of chain molecules. In this work, we focus on structures on the scale of a monomer and investigate polyolefins, i.e. hydrocarbon chains with different small scale architectures. We…
Modeling of polymer chains has received a lot of attention in mathematics. In fact, probabilistic models that naturally arise in statistical mechanics have been widely studied by mathematicians for the very challenging and novel problems…
Polymer models are used to describe chromatin, which can be folded at different spatial scales by binding molecules. By folding, chromatin generates loops of various sizes. We present here a randomly cross-linked (RCL) polymer model, where…
We present a statistical mechanics approach to the protein folding problem. We first review some of the basic properties of proteins, and introduce some physical models to describe their thermodynamics. These models rely on a random…
Polydispersity is inevitable in industrially produced polymers. Established theories of polymer dynamics and rheology, however, were mostly built on monodisperse linear polymers. Dynamics of polydisperse polymers is yet to be fully explored…
The conformational behavior of a coarse-grained finite polymer chain near an attractive spherical surface was investigated by means of multicanonical Monte Carlo computer simulations. In a detailed analysis of canonical equilibrium data…
Shape transformations in driven and damped molecular chains are considered. Closed chains of weakly coupled molecular subunits under the action of spatially homogeneous time-periodic external field are studied. The coupling between the…
We study the geometric properties of the energy landscape of coarse-grained, off-lattice models of polymers by endowing the configuration space with a suitable metric, depending on the potential energy function, such that the dynamical…
We investigate the folding and forced-unbinding transitions of adsorbed semiflexible polymer chains using theory and simulations. These processes describe biologically relevant phenomena that include adhesive interactions between proteins…
Rigid particles pack into structures, such as sand dunes on the beach, whose overall stability is determined by the average number of contacts between particles. However, when packing spatially extended objects with flexible shapes,…
We develop a general analysis of the diffusive dynamics of polydisperse polymers in the presence of chemical potential gradients, within the context of the tube model (with all species entangled). We obtain a set of coupled dynamical…
The dynamics of polymer decompression, i.e., a process from compressed, compact state to the relaxed swoll en conformation, can be formally described as a {\it nonlinear diffusion}. We discuss here two basic examples: (i) the expansion, or…
This research paper comprehensively explores the effects of molecular weight and chain architecture on the interfacial and thermodynamic properties of cyclic and linear polymer blends. Utilizing the Kremer-Grest bead-spring model, the study…
By simulating the first order globule-crystal transition of a flexible homopolymer chain, both by collision dynamics and Monte Carlo with non-kinetic moves, we show that the effective and the thermodynamic transition temperatures are…
We investigate the kinetics of a polymer collapse due to the formation of irreversible crosslinks between its monomers. Using the contact probability $P(s)$ as a scale-dependent order parameter depending on the chemical distance $s$, our…
The paper presents a short overview of the theoretical, numerical and experimental works on the critical behavior of a dilute polymer solution of long-flexible polymer chains confined in semi-infinite space restricted by a surface or in a…
Ring polymers are prevalent in natural and engineered systems, including circular bacterial DNA, crown ethers for cation chelation, and mechanical nanoswitches. The morphology and dynamics of ring polymers are governed by the chemistry and…
Two coarse-grained models for polymer chains in dense glass-forming polymer melts are studied by computer simulation: the bond-fluctuation model on a simple cubic lattice, where a bond-length potential favors long bonds, is treated by…
We propose a continuum theory to model the Mullins effect, which is ubiquitously observed in polymer composites. In the theory, the softening of the materials during the stretching process is accounted for by considering the delamination of…
Predicting the macroscopic mechanical behavior of polymeric materials from the micro-structural features has remained a challenge for decades. Existing theoretical models often fail to accurately capture the experimental data, due to…