Related papers: Physics of thick polymers
A framework is presented for understanding the common character of proteins. Proteins are linear chain molecules. However, the simple model of a polymer viewed as spheres tethered together does not account for many of the observed…
Proteins form a very important class of polymers. In spite of major advances in the understanding of polymer science, the protein problem has remained largely unsolved. Here, we show that a polymer chain viewed as a tube not only captures…
By means of sophisticated Monte Carlo methods, we investigate the conformational phase diagram of a simple model for flexible polymers with explicit thickness. The thickness constraint, which is introduced geometrically via the global…
In this work we present the general phase behavior of short tubelike flexible polymers. The geometric thickness constraint is implemented through the concept of the global radius of curvature. We use sophisticated Monte Carlo sampling…
We report Monte Carlo simulations of the self-assembly of supramolecular polymers based on a model of patchy particles. We find a first-order phase transition, characterized by hysteresis and nucleation, toward a solid bundle of polymers,…
The shape of a polymer plays an important role in determining its interactions with other molecules and with the environment, and is in turn affected by both of them. As a consequence, in the literature the shape properties of a chain in…
Proteins, chain molecules of amino acids, behave in ways which are similar to each other yet quite distinct from standard compact polymers. We demonstrate that the Flory theorem, derived for polymer melts, holds for compact protein native…
Molecular dynamics simulations are used to study structure formation in simple model polymer chains that are subject to excluded volume and torsional interactions. The changing conformations exhibited by chains of different lengths under…
Molecular dynamics simulation methods are used to study the folding of polymer chains into packed cubic states. The polymer model, based on a chain of linked sites moving in the continuum, includes both excluded volume and torsional…
Chain molecules play important roles in industry and in living cells. Our focus here is on distinct ways of modeling the stiffness inherent in a chain molecule. We consider three types of stiffnesses -- one yielding an energy penalty for…
Constitutive equations are derived for the viscoelastic response of rubbery polymers at finite strains. A polymer is thought of as a network of long chains connected to temporary junctions. At a random time, a chain detaches from a…
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…
In this article, we review thermal transport in polymers with different morphologies from aligned fibers to bulk amorphous states. We survey early and recent efforts in engineering polymers with high thermal conductivity by fabricating…
The aim of this paper is to investigate the distribution of a continuous polymer in the presence of an attractive finitely supported potential. The most intricate behavior can be observed if we simultaneously and independently vary two…
We have studied the thermodynamics of isolated homopolymer chains of varying stiffness using a lattice model. A complex phase behaviour is found; phases include chain-folded `crystalline' structures, the disordered globule and the coil. It…
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…
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…
Mesh-like structures, such as mucus gel or cytoskeleton networks, are ubiquitous in biological systems. These intricate structures are composed of cross-linked, semi-flexible bio-filaments, crucial to numerous biological processes. In many…
We report molecular dynamics simulation results on the equilibrium properties of polymer thin films adsorbed onto flat and curved substrates. We first systematically determine the contact angle of polymer droplets on flat substrates as a…
We show that non-entangled polymers display an elastic-like behaviour at a macroscopic scale (probed at some 0.100 mm thickness) up to at least hundred degrees above the glass transition temperature. This observation, found under…