Force-induced unfolding of a homopolymer on fractal lattice: exact results vs. mean field predictions

Abstract

We study the force-induced unfolding of a homopolymer on the three dimensional Sierpinski gasket. The polymer is subject to a contact energy between nearest neighbour sites not consecutive along the chain and to a stretching force. The hierarchical nature of the lattice we consider allows for an exact treatment which yields the phase diagram and the critical behaviour. We show that for this model mean field predictions are not correct, in particular in the exact phase diagram there is {\em not} a low temperature reentrance and we find that the force induced unfolding transition below the theta temperature is second order.

15 pages, 5 eps figures

References in corpus (5)

• Force and kinetic barriers in unzipping of DNA
• Dynamical scaling of the DNA unzipping transition
• Force-induced denaturation of RNA
• Stretched Polymers in a Poor Solvent
• Mechanical denaturation of DNA: existence of a low temperature denaturation

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Stretching of a polymer below the Theta point
• Statistical Physics of RNA-folding
• Mechanical unfolding of directed polymers in a poor solvent: novel critical exponents
• Polymers in crowded environment under stretching force: globule-coil transitions
• Semi-flexible compact polymers in two dimensional nonhomogeneous confinement
• Mapping between the order of thermal denaturation and the shape of the critical line of mechanical unzipping in 1-dimensional DNA models
• Theta-polymers in crowded media under the stretching force