The abundance of unknots in various models of polymer loops

DOI10.1088/0305-4470/39/29/005MaRDI QIDQ5484417zbMATHOpenAlexFDO

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)

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

zbMATH Keywords

polymer chainsCauchy-Lorenz distributionrandom-flight distribution

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Statistical mechanics of polymers (82D60)

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.

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