Stretching short biopolymers by fields and forces

Abstract

We study the mechanical properties of semiflexible polymers when the contour length of the polymer is comparable to its persistence length. We compute the exact average end-to-end distance and shape of the polymer for different boundary conditions, and show that boundary effects can lead to significant deviations from the well-known long-polymer results. We also consider the case of stretching a uniformly charged biopolymer by an electric field, for which we compute the average extension and the average shape, which is shown to be trumpetlike. Our results also apply to long biopolymers when thermal fluctuations have been smoothed out by a large applied field or force.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure