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Polymers in a melt may be subject to topological constraints, as in the example of unlinked polymer rings. How to do statistical mechanics in the presence of such constraints remains a fundamental open problem. We study the effect of…
The effect of topology on the collapse transition and instantaneous shape of an energy polydisperse polymer (a model heteropolymer) is studied by means of computer simulations. In particular, we consider three different chain topology,…
One of the most challenging problems in polymer physics is providing a theoretical description for the behaviour of rings in dense solutions and melts. Although it is nowadays well established that the overall size of a ring in these…
Inspired by how certain proteins "sense" knots and entanglements in DNA molecules, here we ask if there exist local geometric features that may be used as a read-out of the underlying topology of generic polymers. We perform molecular…
We study the interplay between entropy and topological constraints for a polymer chain in which sliding rings (slip-links) enforce pair contacts between monomers. These slip-links divide a closed ring polymer into a number of sub-loops…
Entangled networks of stiff biopolymers exhibit complex dynamic response, emerging from the topological constraints that neighboring filaments impose upon each other. We propose a class of reference models for entanglement dynamics of stiff…
Packing under confinement could generate rich ordered structures through entropic effects, which is a fundamental problem in condensed matter, biophysics and material science. The influence of confinement to the anisotropic hard…
In this review we provide an organized summary of the theoretical and computational results which are available for polymers subject to spatial or topological constraints. Because of the interdisciplinary character of the topic, we provide…
We construct a micromechanical version of an early model for topologically constrained polymers -- a 2D chain amongst point-like uncrossable obstacles -- which allows us to explicitly elucidate the role of topological forces beyond…
The tube model is a central concept in polymer physics, and allows to reduce the complex many-filament problem of an entangled polymer solution to a single filament description. We investigate the probability distribution function of…
Simulations of knotting and unknotting in polymers or other filaments rely on random processes to facilitate topological changes. Here we introduce a method of \textit{topological steering} to determine the optimal pathway by which a…
Semiflexible polymers in poor solvents exhibit a rich variety of collapsed morphologies, including globules, toroids, and rodlike bundles, arising from the competition between attractive interactions and chain stiffness. Computer…
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…
Through extensive Monte Carlo simulations, we systematically study the effect of chain stiffness on the packing ability of linear polymers composed of hard spheres in extremely confined monolayers, corresponding effectively to 2D films.…
We present using simple scaling arguments and one step replica symmetry breaking a theory for the localization of semiflexible polymers in a quenched random environment. In contrast to completely flexible polymers, localization of…
One measure of geometrical complexity of a spatial curve is the number of crossings in a planar projection of the curve. For $N$-noded ring polymers with a fixed knot type, we evaluate numerically the average of the crossing number over…
The interplay between non-trivial band topology and strong electronic correlations is a central challenge in modern condensed matter physics. We investigate this competition on a two-leg ladder model with a p-wave-like hybridisation between…
We present a unifying picture of the compact, dense and dilute phases of two-dimensional polymers. The lattice dependence of the scaling exponents for compact polymers is reconciled with their universality in the dense and dilute case. In…
The relaxation of a single knotted ring polymer is studied by Brownian dynamics simulations. The relaxation rate lambda_q for the wave number q is estimated by the least square fit of the equilibrium time-displaced correlation function to a…
Elucidating the physics of a concentrated suspension of ring polymers, or of an ensemble of ring polymers in a complex environment, is an important outstanding question in polymer physics. Many of the characteristic features of these…