Tightness of slip-linked polymer chains
arXiv:cond-mat/0202075 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.65.061103
Abstract
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 which can exchange length between each other. In the ideal chain limit, we find the joint probability density function for the sizes of segments within such a slip-linked polymer chain (paraknot). A particular segment is tight (small in size) or loose (of the order of the overall size of the paraknot) depending on both the number of slip-links it incorporates and its competition with other segments. When self-avoiding interactions are included, scaling arguments can be used to predict the statistics of segment sizes for certain paraknot configurations.
10 pages, 6 figures, REVTeX4
References in corpus (2)
Cited by in corpus (14)
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