English

How long does it take to pull an ideal polymer into a small hole?

Statistical Mechanics 2009-11-11 v2 Soft Condensed Matter

Abstract

We present scaling estimates for characteristic times τlin\tau_{\rm lin} and τbr\tau_{\rm br} of pulling ideal linear and randomly branched polymers of NN monomers into a small hole by a force ff. We show that the absorbtion process develops as sequential straightening of folds of the initial polymer configuration. By estimating the typical size of the fold involved into the motion, we arrive at the following predictions: τlin(N)N3/2/f\tau_{\rm lin}(N) \sim N^{3/2}/f and τbr(N)N5/4/f\tau_{\rm br}(N) \sim N^{5/4}/f, and we also confirm them by the molecular dynamics experiment.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0510418,
  title  = {How long does it take to pull an ideal polymer into a small hole?},
  author = {A. Y. Grosberg and S. Nechaev and M. Tamm and O. Vasilyev},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0510418},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

4 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-22T11:24:07.151Z