Knotting statistics for polygons in lattice tubes

Abstract

We study several related models of self-avoiding polygons in a tubular subgraph of the simple cubic lattice, with a particular interest in the asymptotics of the knotting statistics. Polygons in a tube can be characterised by a finite transfer matrix, and this allows for the derivation of pattern theorems, calculation of growth rates and exact enumeration. We also develop a static Monte Carlo method which allows us to sample polygons of a given size directly from a chosen Boltzmann distribution. Using these methods we accurately estimate the growth rates of unknotted polygons in the $2\times 1\times \infty$ and $3\times 1\times \infty$ tubes, and confirm that these are the same for any fixed knot-type $K$. We also confirm that the entropic exponent for unknots is the same as that of all polygons, and that the exponent for fixed knot-type $K$ depends only on the number of prime factors in the knot decomposition of $K$. For the simplest knot-types, this leads to a good approximation for the polygon size at which the probability of the given knot-type is maximized, and in some cases we are able to sample sufficiently long polygons to observe this numerically.

24 pages, 19 figures