The abundance of unknots in various models of polymer loops

DOI10.1088/0305-4470/39/29/005zbMATH Open1099.82521arXivcond-mat/0604225OpenAlexW2139342346MaRDI QIDQ5484417FDOQ5484417

Authors: Nathan Moore, Alexander Y. Grosberg 

Publication date: 17 August 2006

Published in: Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and General (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: A veritable zoo of different knots is seen in the ensemble of looped polymer chains, whether created computationally or observed in vitro. At short loop lengths, the spectrum of knots is dominated by the trivial knot (unknot). The fractional abundance of this topological state in the ensemble of all conformations of the loop of $N$ segments follows a decaying exponential form, $simexp(-N/N_0)$, where $N_0$ marks the crossover from a mostly unknotted (ie topologically simple) to a mostly knotted (ie topologically complex) ensemble. In the present work we use computational simulation to look closer into the variation of $N_0$ for a variety of polymer models. Among models examined, $N_0$ is smallest (about 240) for the model with all segments of the same length, it is somewhat larger (305) for Gaussian distributed segments, and can be very large (up to many thousands) when the segment length distribution has a fat power law tail.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0604225

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zbMATH Keywords

polymer chainsCauchy-Lorenz distributionrandom-flight distribution

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Statistical mechanics of polymers (82D60)

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