51,490 research outputs found
Minimality and mutation-equivalence of polygons
We introduce a concept of minimality for Fano polygons. We show that, up to
mutation, there are only finitely many Fano polygons with given singularity
content, and give an algorithm to determine the mutation-equivalence classes of
such polygons. This is a key step in a program to classify orbifold del Pezzo
surfaces using mirror symmetry. As an application, we classify all Fano
polygons such that the corresponding toric surface is qG-deformation-equivalent
to either (i) a smooth surface; or (ii) a surface with only singularities of
type 1/3(1,1).Comment: 29 page
Universal Amplitude Combinations for Self-Avoiding Walks, Polygons and Trails
We give exact relations for a number of amplitude combinations that occur in
the study of self-avoiding walks, polygons and lattice trails. In particular,
we elucidate the lattice-dependent factors which occur in those combinations
which are otherwise universal, show how these are modified for oriented
lattices, and give new results for amplitude ratios involving even moments of
the area of polygons. We also survey numerical results for a wide range of
amplitudes on a number of oriented and regular lattices, and provide some new
ones.Comment: 20 pages, NI 92016, OUTP 92-54S, UCSBTH-92-5
The entropic cost to tie a knot
We estimate by Monte Carlo simulations the configurational entropy of
-steps polygons in the cubic lattice with fixed knot type. By collecting a
rich statistics of configurations with very large values of we are able to
analyse the asymptotic behaviour of the partition function of the problem for
different knot types. Our results confirm that, in the large limit, each
prime knot is localized in a small region of the polygon, regardless of the
possible presence of other knots. Each prime knot component may slide along the
unknotted region contributing to the overall configurational entropy with a
term proportional to . Furthermore, we discover that the mere existence
of a knot requires a well defined entropic cost that scales exponentially with
its minimal length. In the case of polygons with composite knots it turns out
that the partition function can be simply factorized in terms that depend only
on prime components with an additional combinatorial factor that takes into
account the statistical property that by interchanging two identical prime knot
components in the polygon the corresponding set of overall configuration
remains unaltered. Finally, the above results allow to conjecture a sequence of
inequalities for the connective constants of polygons whose topology varies
within a given family of composite knot types
Knotting probabilities after a local strand passage in unknotted self-avoiding polygons
We investigate the knotting probability after a local strand passage is
performed in an unknotted self-avoiding polygon on the simple cubic lattice. We
assume that two polygon segments have already been brought close together for
the purpose of performing a strand passage, and model this using Theta-SAPs,
polygons that contain the pattern Theta at a fixed location. It is proved that
the number of n-edge Theta-SAPs grows exponentially (with n) at the same rate
as the total number of n-edge unknotted self-avoiding polygons, and that the
same holds for subsets of n-edge Theta-SAPs that yield a specific
after-strand-passage knot-type. Thus the probability of a given
after-strand-passage knot-type does not grow (or decay) exponentially with n,
and we conjecture that instead it approaches a knot-type dependent amplitude
ratio lying strictly between 0 and 1. This is supported by critical exponent
estimates obtained from a new maximum likelihood method for Theta-SAPs that are
generated by a composite (aka multiple) Markov Chain Monte Carlo BFACF
algorithm. We also give strong numerical evidence that the after-strand-passage
knotting probability depends on the local structure around the strand passage
site. Considering both the local structure and the crossing-sign at the strand
passage site, we observe that the more "compact" the local structure, the less
likely the after-strand-passage polygon is to be knotted. This trend is
consistent with results from other strand-passage models, however, we are the
first to note the influence of the crossing-sign information. Two measures of
"compactness" are used: the size of a smallest polygon that contains the
structure and the structure's "opening" angle. The opening angle definition is
consistent with one that is measurable from single molecule DNA experiments.Comment: 31 pages, 12 figures, submitted to Journal of Physics
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