Polymer Reptation in Disordered Media

Abstract

The effect of ambient disorders and sequence heterogeneities on the reptation of a long polymer is studied with the aid of a disordered tube model. The dynamics of a random heteropolymer is found to be much slower than that of a homopolymer due to collective pinning effects. The asymptotic properties belong to the universality class of a directed path in (1+1)-dimensional random media.

4 pages, to appear in PRL; text, figures and related (p)reprints also available at http://matisse.ucsd.edu/~hwa/pub.html

References in corpus (1)

• Vortex Pinning and Non-Hermitian Quantum Mechanics

Cited by in corpus (4)

• The long reach of DNA sequence heterogeneity in diffusive processes
• Structural crossover of polymers in disordered media
• Anomalous scaling of heterogeneous elastic lines: a new picture from sample to sample fluctuations
• Dynamics of linear polymers in random media