Polymer collapse and crystallization in bond fluctuation models

While the $\Theta$-collapse of single long polymers in bad solvents is usually a continuous (tri-critical) phase transition, there are exceptions where it is preempted by a discontinuous crystallization (liquid $\leftrightarrow$ solid) transition. For a version of the bond-fluctuation model (a model where monomers are represented as $2\times 2\times 2$ cubes, and bonds can have lengths between 2 and $\sqrt{10}$) it was recently shown by F. Rampf {\it et al.} that there exist distinct collapse and crystallization transitions for long but {\it finite} chains. But as the chain length goes to infinity, both transition temperatures converge to the same $T^*$, i.e. infinitely long polymers collapse immediately into a solid state. We explain this by the observation that polymers crystallize in the Rampf {\it et al.} model into a non-trivial cubic crystal structure (the `A15' or `Cr$_3$Si' Frank-Kasper structure) which has many degenerate ground states and, as a consequence, Bloch walls. If one controlls the polymer growth such that only one ground state is populated and Bloch walls are completely avoided, the liquid-solid transition is a smooth cross-over without any sharp transition at all.Comment: 4 page

Self-trapping self-repelling random walks

Although the title seems self-contradictory, it does not contain a misprint. The model we study is a seemingly minor modification of the "true self-avoiding walk" (TSAW) model of Amit, Parisi, and Peliti in two dimensions. The walks in it are self-repelling up to a characteristic time $T^*$ (which depends on various parameters), but spontaneously (i.e., without changing any control parameter) become self-trapping after that. For free walks, $T^*$ is astronomically large, but on finite lattices the transition is easily observable. In the self-trapped regime, walks are subdiffusive and intermittent, spending longer and longer times in small areas until they escape and move rapidly to a new area. In spite of this, these walks are extremely efficient in covering finite lattices, as measured by average cover times.Comment: 5 pages main paper + 5 pages supplementary materia

Sequential Monte Carlo Methods for Protein Folding

We describe a class of growth algorithms for finding low energy states of heteropolymers. These polymers form toy models for proteins, and the hope is that similar methods will ultimately be useful for finding native states of real proteins from heuristic or a priori determined force fields. These algorithms share with standard Markov chain Monte Carlo methods that they generate Gibbs-Boltzmann distributions, but they are not based on the strategy that this distribution is obtained as stationary state of a suitably constructed Markov chain. Rather, they are based on growing the polymer by successively adding individual particles, guiding the growth towards configurations with lower energies, and using "population control" to eliminate bad configurations and increase the number of "good ones". This is not done via a breadth-first implementation as in genetic algorithms, but depth-first via recursive backtracking. As seen from various benchmark tests, the resulting algorithms are extremely efficient for lattice models, and are still competitive with other methods for simple off-lattice models.Comment: 10 pages; published in NIC Symposium 2004, eds. D. Wolf et al. (NIC, Juelich, 2004

Universality and Asymptotic Scaling in Drilling Percolation

We present simulations of a 3-d percolation model studied recently by K.J. Schrenk et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 055701 (2016)], obtained with a new and more efficient algorithm. They confirm most of their results in spite of larger systems and higher statistics used in the present paper, but we also find indications that the results do not yet represent the true asymptotic behavior. The model is obtained by replacing the isotropic holes in ordinary Bernoulli percolation by randomly placed and oriented cylinders, with the constraint that the cylinders are parallel to one of the three coordinate axes. We also speculate on possible generalizations.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

On the Continuum Time Limit of Reaction-Diffusion Systems

The parity conserving branching-annihilating random walk (pc-BARW) model is a reaction-diffusion system on a lattice where particles can branch into $m$ offsprings with even $m$ and hop to neighboring sites. If two or more particles land on the same site, they immediately annihilate pairwise. In this way the number of particles is preserved modulo two. It is well known that the pc-BARW with $m=2$ in 1 spatial dimension has no phase transition (it is always subcritical), if the hopping is described by a continuous time random walk. In contrast, the $m=2$ 1-d pc-BARW has a phase transition when formulated in discrete time, but we show that the continuous time limit is non-trivial: When the time step $\delta t\to 0$, the branching and hopping probabilities at the critical point scale with different powers of $\delta t$. These powers are different for different microscopic realizations. Although this phenomenon is not observed in some other reaction-diffusion systems like, e.g. the contact process, we argue that it should be generic and not restricted to the 1-d pc-BARW model.Comment: 3 pages, including 2 figure

Tricritical directed percolation in 2+1 dimensions

We present detailed simulations of a generalization of the Domany-Kinzel model to 2+1 dimensions. It has two control parameters $p$ and $q$ which describe the probabilities $P_k$ of a site to be wetted, if exactly $k$ of its "upstream" neighbours are already wetted. If $P_k$ depends only weakly on $k$, the active/adsorbed phase transition is in the directed percolation (DP) universality class. If, however, $P_k$ increases fast with $k$ so that the formation of inactive holes surrounded by active sites is suppressed, the transition is first order. These two transition lines meet at a tricritical point. This point should be in the same universality class as a tricritical transition in the contact process studied recently by L\"ubeck. Critical exponents for it have been calculated previously by means of the field theoretic epsilon-expansion ($\epsilon = 3-d$, with $d=2$ in the present case). Rather poor agreement is found with either.Comment: 10 pages, including 10 figures; accepted for JSTA

Temporal scaling at Feigenbaum points and non-extensive thermodynamics

We show that recent claims for the non-stationary behaviour of the logistic map at the Feigenbaum point based on non-extensive thermodynamics are either wrong or can be easily deduced from well-known properties of the Feigenbaum attractor. In particular, there is no generalized Pesin identity for this system, the existing "proofs" being based on misconceptions about basic notions of ergodic theory. In deriving several new scaling laws of the Feigenbaum attractor, thorough use is made of its detailed structure, but there is no obvious connection to non-extensive thermodynamics.Comment: accepted for Phys. Rev. Let