Macromolecules in Disordered Environments: From Flexible to Semiflexible Polymers: Macromolecules in Disordered Environments:From Flexible to Semiflexible Polymers

This work is a numerical examination of a semiflexible polymer exposed to a disorder landscape consisting of hard disks. For a small parameter range and simple constraints it is known that disorder leads to structural transitions of the equilibrium properties of polymers. The scope of this work strongly extends this range by going to both high disorder densities and large stiffnesses of the polymers. The competing length scales of polymer stiffness and average distance between the obstacles of the potential along with the way of assembling the disorder lead to a wide range of effects such as crumpling and stretching of polymer configurations due to the disorder or a modulation of the polymer’s characterizing observables with the correlation function of the potential. The high accuracy results presented in this work have been obtained by means of sophisticated Monte Carlo simulations. The refinement of a rarely applied but highly promising method to a state of the art algorithm in connection with latest numerical techniques made it possible to investigate the impact of hard-disk disorder on semiflexible polymer conformations on a broad scale

Polymers in disordered environments

Using a combination of analytical theory and newly developed numerical algorithms, we analyze the most pertinent conformational characteristics of three paradigmatic types of polymers in disordered environments: (i) flexible polymers in quenched, self-similar disorder as represented by a self-avoiding random walk on a critical percolation cluster, (ii) semiflexible polymers in quenched, steric disorder as represented by an equilibrium hard-disk fluid and (iii) semiflexible polymers subject to the random energy landscape that emerges from a surrounding network of similar semiflexible polymers

Macromolecules in Disordered Environments: From Flexible to Semiflexible Polymers: Macromolecules in Disordered Environments:From Flexible to Semiflexible Polymers

This work is a numerical examination of a semiflexible polymer exposed to a disorder landscape consisting of hard disks. For a small parameter range and simple constraints it is known that disorder leads to structural transitions of the equilibrium properties of polymers. The scope of this work strongly extends this range by going to both high disorder densities and large stiffnesses of the polymers. The competing length scales of polymer stiffness and average distance between the obstacles of the potential along with the way of assembling the disorder lead to a wide range of effects such as crumpling and stretching of polymer configurations due to the disorder or a modulation of the polymer’s characterizing observables with the correlation function of the potential. The high accuracy results presented in this work have been obtained by means of sophisticated Monte Carlo simulations. The refinement of a rarely applied but highly promising method to a state of the art algorithm in connection with latest numerical techniques made it possible to investigate the impact of hard-disk disorder on semiflexible polymer conformations on a broad scale

Macromolecules in Disordered Environments: From Flexible to Semiflexible Polymers: Macromolecules in Disordered Environments:From Flexible to Semiflexible Polymers

This work is a numerical examination of a semiflexible polymer exposed to a disorder landscape consisting of hard disks. For a small parameter range and simple constraints it is known that disorder leads to structural transitions of the equilibrium properties of polymers. The scope of this work strongly extends this range by going to both high disorder densities and large stiffnesses of the polymers. The competing length scales of polymer stiffness and average distance between the obstacles of the potential along with the way of assembling the disorder lead to a wide range of effects such as crumpling and stretching of polymer configurations due to the disorder or a modulation of the polymer’s characterizing observables with the correlation function of the potential. The high accuracy results presented in this work have been obtained by means of sophisticated Monte Carlo simulations. The refinement of a rarely applied but highly promising method to a state of the art algorithm in connection with latest numerical techniques made it possible to investigate the impact of hard-disk disorder on semiflexible polymer conformations on a broad scale

Polymers in disordered environments

Using a combination of analytical theory and newly developed numerical algorithms, we analyze the most pertinent conformational characteristics of three paradigmatic types of polymers in disordered environments: (i) flexible polymers in quenched, self-similar disorder as represented by a self-avoiding random walk on a critical percolation cluster, (ii) semiflexible polymers in quenched, steric disorder as represented by an equilibrium hard-disk fluid and (iii) semiflexible polymers subject to the random energy landscape that emerges from a surrounding network of similar semiflexible polymers

Polymers in disordered environments

Using a combination of analytical theory and newly developed numerical algorithms, we analyze the most pertinent conformational characteristics of three paradigmatic types of polymers in disordered environments: (i) flexible polymers in quenched, self-similar disorder as represented by a self-avoiding random walk on a critical percolation cluster, (ii) semiflexible polymers in quenched, steric disorder as represented by an equilibrium hard-disk fluid and (iii) semiflexible polymers subject to the random energy landscape that emerges from a surrounding network of similar semiflexible polymers