Helical structures from an isotropic homopolymer model

Abstract

We present Monte Carlo simulation results for square-well homopolymers at a series of bond lengths. Although the model contains only isotropic pairwise interactions, under appropriate conditions this system shows spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, where the chain exists in either a left- or a right-handed helical structure. We investigate how this behavior depends upon the ratio between bond length and monomer radius.

10 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication by Physical Review Letters

References in corpus (2)

• Formation of helical states in wormlike polymer chains
• On the Extension Behavior of Helicogenic Polypeptides

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