Related papers: Ideal-Chain Collapse in Biopolymers
To design increasingly tough, resilient, and fatigue-resistant elastomers and hydrogels, the relationship between controllable network parameters at the molecular level to macroscopic quantities that govern damage and failure must be…
Recent experiments have established negative energetic elasticity, the negative contribution of energy to the elastic modulus, as a universal property of polymer gels. To reveal the microscopic origin of this phenomenon, Shirai and…
Classical network elasticity theories are based on the concept of flexible volumeless polymers fixed into a network in which there are no excluded volume, or even topological interactions, and where the chains explore accessible…
We have designed a new experimental setup able to investigate fracture of soft materials at small scales. At high crack velocity, where energy is mostly dissipated through viscoelastic processes, we observe an increasingly large high strain…
The elastic response is studied of a single flexible chain grafted on a rigid plane and an ensemble of non-interacting tethered chains. It is demonstrated that the entropic theory of rubber elasticity leads to conclusions that disagree with…
We consider a fully directed self-avoiding walk model on a cubic lattice to mimic the conformations of an infinitely long confined flexible polymer chain; and the confinement condition is achieved by two parallel athermal plates. The…
Linear viscoelastic properties for a dilute polymer solution are predicted by modeling the solution as a suspension of non-interacting bead-spring chains. The present model, unlike the Rouse model, can describe the solution's rheological…
Using a theoretical model we show that ideal ring polymers are stronger depletants than ideal linear polymers of equal radii of gyration, but not of equal hydrodynamic radii. The difference in the depletion-induced force profile is largely…
We present force-clamp data on the collapse of ubiquitin polyproteins in response to a quench in the force. These nonequilibrium trajectories are analyzed using a general method based on a diffusive assumption of the end-to-end length to…
The entropic effects of anchored polymers on biomembranes are studied using simulations of a meshless membrane model combined with anchored linear polymer chains. The bending rigidity and spontaneous curvature are investigated for anchored…
An expression is derived for the strain energy of a polymer chain under an arbitrary three-dimensional deformation with finite strains. For a Gaussian chain, this expression is reduced to the conventional Moony--Rivlin constitutive law,…
Single-chain elasticity is of fundamental importance in polymer physics, as it underlies many of the unique properties of polymer systems. Recently, there has been interest in characterizing the elastic properties of catenanes, molecular…
Force induced stretching of polymers is important in a variety of contexts. We have used theory and simulations to describe the response of homopolymers, with $N$ monomers, to force ($f$) in good and poor solvents. In good solvents and for…
Experimental results from mechanical viscoelastic as well as dielectric relaxation times were compared to theoretical expectations utilizing polymer scaling theory. Viscoelastic relaxation of a hydrogel at 33% relative humidity fabricated…
We investigate the collapse kinetics of charged polymers (polyelectrolytes) induced by counterion condensation using coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations. Under good solvent conditions, polyelectrolytes above the critical charge…
Filamentous bio-materials such as fibrin or collagen networks exhibit an enormous stiffening of their elastic moduli upon large deformations. This pronounced nonlinear behavior stems from a significant separation between the stiffnesses…
Most of the theoretical models describing the translocation of a polymer chain through a nanopore use the hypothesis that the polymer is always relaxed during the complete process. In other words, models generally assume that the…
The adsorption of polydisperse ideal polymer chains is shown to be sensitive to the large N tail of the distribution of chains. If and only if the number of chains decays more slowly than exponentially then there is an adsorption transition…
We study folding in 16-monomer heteropolymers on the square lattice. For a given sequence, thermodynamic properties and stability of the native state are unique. However, the kinetics of folding depends on the model of dynamics adopted for…
Homopolymer chain with beads forming pairwise reversible bonds is a well-known model in polymer physics. We studied kinetics of homopolymer chain collapse, which was induced by pairwise reversible bonds formation. We compared kinetic…