Robert S. Hoy, Jared Harwayne-Gidansky, Corey S. O'Hern
We extend recent studies of the minimal energy packings of short flexible polymers with hard-core-like repulsions and short-range attractions to include bond-angle interactions with the aim of describing the collapsed conformations of `colloidal' polymers. We find that flexible tangent sticky-hard-sphere (t-SHS) packings provide a useful perturbative basis for analyzing polymer packings with nonzero bending stiffness only for {\it small} ratios of the stiffnesses for the bond-angle and pair interactions, $k_b^{\rm crit}/k_c \lesssim 0.01$ for $N<10$, and the critical ratio decreases with the number of monomers $N$. Thus we argue that future studies should not use flexible t-SHS minimal energy packings as a reference set to enumerate and characterize the structural and mechanical properties of polymer packings with finite bending stiffness.
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http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.3712
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