How a single stretched polymer responds coherently to a minute oscillation in fluctuating environments: An entropic stochastic resonance

Within the cell, biopolymers are often situated in constrained, fluid environments, e.g., cytoskeletal networks, stretched DNAs in chromatin. It is of paramount importance to understand quantitatively how they, utilizing their flexibility, optimally respond to a minute signal, which is, in general, temporally fluctuating far away from equilibrium. To this end, we analytically study viscoelastic response and associated stochastic resonance in a stretched single semi-flexible chain to an oscillatory force or electric field. Including hydrodynamic interactions between chain segments, we evaluate dynamics of the polymer extension in coherent response to the force or field. We find power amplification factor of the response at a noise-strength (temperature) can attain the maximum that grows as the chain length increases, indicative of an entropic stochastic resonance (ESR). In particular for a charged chain under an electric field, we find that the maximum also occurs at an optimal chain length, a new feature of ESR. The hydrodynamic interaction is found to enhance the power amplification, representing unique polymer cooperativity which the fluid background imparts despite its overdamping nature. For the slow oscillatory force, the resonance behavior is explained by the chain undulation of the longest wavelength. This novel ESR phenomenon suggests how a biopolymer self-organizes in an overdamping environment, utilizing its flexibility and thermal fluctuations

Black Hole as a Wormhole Factory

On general grounds, one may argue that a black hole stops radiation at the Planck mass, where the radiated energy is comparable to the black hole's mass. And also, it has been argued that there would be a "wormhole-like" structure, known as "space-time foam", due to large fluctuations below the Planck length. In this paper, as an explicit example, we consider an exact classical solution which represents nicely those two properties in a recently proposed quantum gravity model based on different scaling dimensions between space and time coordinates. The solution, called "Black Wormhole", consists of two different states, depending on its mass M and an IR parameter omega: For the black hole state, a non-traversable wormhole occupies the interior region of the black hole around the singularity at the origin, whereas for the wormhole state, the interior wormhole is exposed to an outside observer as the black hole horizon is disappeared from evaporation. The black hole state becomes thermodynamically stable as it approaches to the merge point where the interior wormhole throat and the black hole horizon merges, and the Hawking temperature vanishes at the exact merge point. This solution suggests the "Generalized Cosmic Censorship" by the existence of a wormhole-like structure which protects the naked singularity even after the black hole evaporation. One could understand the would-be wormholes inside the black hole horizon as the results of microscopic wormholes created by "negative" energy quanta which have entered the black hole horizon in Hawking radiation processes: The quantum black hole could be a wormhole factory. It is found that this speculative picture may be consistent with the recent "ER=EPR" proposal for resolving the recent black hole entanglement debates.Comment: Added some more words on (1) the transition between the black hole phase and wormhole phase and (2) the notion of a wormhole "factory" in Fig. 5. Updated references, Accepted in PL