Transverse fluctuations of grafted polymers

We study the statistical mechanics of grafted polymers of arbitrary stiffness in a two-dimensional embedding space with Monte Carlo simulations. The probability distribution function of the free end is found to be highly anisotropic and non-Gaussian for typical semiflexible polymers. The reduced distribution in the transverse direction, a Gaussian in the stiff and flexible limits, shows a double peak structure at intermediate stiffnesses. We also explore the response to a transverse force applied at the polymer free end. We identify F-Actin as an ideal benchmark for the effects discussed.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Physical Review

Perturbation Theory for Path Integrals of Stiff Polymers

The wormlike chain model of stiff polymers is a nonlinear $\sigma$-model in one spacetime dimension in which the ends are fluctuating freely. This causes important differences with respect to the presently available theory which exists only for periodic and Dirichlet boundary conditions. We modify this theory appropriately and show how to perform a systematic large-stiffness expansions for all physically interesting quantities in powers of $L/\xi$, where $L$ is the length and $\xi$ the persistence length of the polymer. This requires special procedures for regularizing highly divergent Feynman integrals which we have developed in previous work. We show that by adding to the unperturbed action a correction term ${\cal A}^{\rm corr}$, we can calculate all Feynman diagrams with Green functions satisfying Neumann boundary conditions. Our expansions yield, order by order, properly normalized end-to-end distribution function in arbitrary dimensions $d$, its even and odd moments, and the two-point correlation function