Dynamics of diffusion controlled chain closure: flexible chain in presence of hydrodynamic interaction

Based on the Wilemski-Fixman approach (J. Chem. Phys. 60, 866 (1974)) we showed that for a flexible chain in theta solvent hydrodynamic interaction treated with an pre-averaging approximation makes ring closing faster if the chain is not very short. Only for a very short chain the ring closing is slower with hydrodynamic interaction on. We have also shown that the ring closing time for a chain with hydrodynamic interaction in theta solvent scales with the chain length (N) as N^(1.527), in good agreement with previous renormalization group calculation based prediction by Freidman et al. (Phys. Rev. A. 40, 5950 (1989))

Dynamics of end to end loop formation for an isolated chain in viscoelastic fluid

We theoretically investigate the looping dynamics of a linear polymer immersed in a viscoelastic fluid. The dynamics of the chain is governed by a Rouse model with a fractional memory kernel recently proposed by Weber et al. (S. C. Weber, J. A. Theriot, and A. J. Spakowitz, Phys. Rev. E 82, 011913 (2010)). Using the Wilemski-Fixman (G. Wilemski and M. Fixman, J. Chem. Phys. 60, 866 (1974)) formalism we calculate the looping time for a chain in a viscoelastic fluid where the mean square displacement of the center of mass of the chain scales as t^(1/2). We observe that the looping time is faster for the chain in viscoelastic fluid than for a Rouse chain in Newtonian fluid up to a chain length and above this chain length the trend is reversed. Also no scaling of the looping time with the length of the chain seems to exist for the chain in viscoelastic fluid