Bending rigidity of stiff polyelectrolyte chains: Single chain and a bundle of multichains

We study the bending rigidity of highly charged stiff polyelectrolytes, for both a single chain and many chains forming a bundle. A theory is developed to account for the interplay between competitive binding of counterions and charge correlations in softening the polyelectrolyte (PE) chains. The presence of even a small concentration of multivalent counterions leads to a dramatic reduction in the bending rigidity of the chains that are nominally stiffened by the repulsion between their backbone charges. The variation of the bending rigidity as a function of $f_{0}$, the fraction of charged monomers on the chain, does not exhibits simple scaling behavior; it grows with increasing $f_{0}$ below a critical value of $f_{0}$. Beyond the critical value, however, the chain becomes softer as $f_{0}$ increases. The bending rigidity also exhibits intriguing dependence on the concentration of multivalent counterion $n_{2}$; for highly charged PEs, the bending rigidity decreases as $n_2$ increases from zero, while it increases with increasing $n_{2}$ beyond a certain value of $n_{2}$. When polyelectrolyte chains form a $N$-loop condensate (e.g., a toroidal bundle formed by $N$ turns (winds) of the chain), the inter-loop coupling further softens the condensate, resulting in the bending free energy of the condensate that scales as $N$ for large $N$.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure

Semiflexible Chains under Tension

A functional integral formalism is used to derive the extension of a stiff chain subject to an external force. The force versus extension curves are calculated using a meanfield approach in which the hard constraint $u^2(s)=1$ is replaced by a global constraint $= 1$ where $u(s)$ is the tangent vector describing the chain and $s$ is the arc length. The theory ``quantitatively'' reproduces the experimental results for DNA that is subject to a constant force. We also treat the problems of a semiflexible chain in a nematic field. In the limit of weak nematic field strength our treatment reproduces the exact results for chain expansion parallel to the director. When the strength of nematic field is large, a situation in which there are two equivalent minima in the free energy, the intrinsically meanfield approach yields incorrect results for the dependence of the persistence length on the nematic field.Comment: 14 pages, 1 figure available upon request, submitted to J. Chem. Phy

Entanglement witnesses arising from Choi type positive linear maps

We construct optimal PPTES witnesses to detect $3\otimes 3$ PPT entangled edge states of type $(6,8)$ constructed recently \cite{kye_osaka}. To do this, we consider positive linear maps which are variants of the Choi type map involving complex numbers, and examine several notions related to optimality for those entanglement witnesses. Through the discussion, we suggest a method to check the optimality of entanglement witnesses without the spanning property.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl