0000000000711334
AUTHOR
Eric Horwath
showing 2 related works from this author
Mapping onto ideal chains overestimates self-entanglements in polymer melts
2017
In polymer physics it is typically assumed that excluded volume interactions are effectively screened in polymer melts. Hence, chains could be described by an effective random walk without excluded volume interactions. In this letter, we show that this mapping is problematic by analyzing the occurrence of knots, their spectrum and sizes in polymer melts, corresponding random walks and chains in dilute solution. The effective random walk severely overrates the occurrence of knots and their complexity, particularly when compared to melts of flexible chains, indicating that non-trivial effects due to remnants of self-avoidance still play a significant role for the chain lengths considered in t…
Knots in finite memory walks
2016
We investigate the occurrence and size of knots in a continuum polymer model with finite memory via Monte Carlo simulations. Excluded volume interactions are local and extend only to a fixed number of successive beads along the chain, ensuring that at short length scales the excluded volume effect dominates, while at longer length scales the polymer behaves like a random walk. As such, this model may be useful for understanding the behavior of polymers in a melt or semi-dilute solution, where exactly the same crossover is believed to occur. In particular, finite memory walks allow us to investigate the role of local interactions in the transition from highly knotted ideal polymers to almost…