Friday, November 9, 2012

1211.1879 (Richard Matthews et al.)

Effect of bending rigidity on the knotting of a polymer under tension    [PDF]

Richard Matthews, Ard A. Louis, Christos N. Likos
A coarse-grained computational model is used to investigate how the bending rigidity of a polymer under tension affects the formation of a trefoil knot. Thermodynamic integration techniques are applied to demonstrate that the free-energy cost of forming a knot has a minimum at non-zero bending rigidity. The position of the minimum exhibits a power-law dependence on the applied tension. For knotted polymers with non-uniform bending rigidity, the knots preferentially localize in the region with a bending rigidity that minimizes the free-energy.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.1879

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