APS March Meeting 2016
Volume 61, Number 2
Monday–Friday, March 14–18, 2016;
Baltimore, Maryland
Session F4: Polymer Architecture Effects on Structure Dynamics
11:15 AM–2:15 PM,
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
Room: Ballroom IV
Sponsoring
Unit:
DPOLY
Chair: Michael Rubinstein, Univ of NC - Chapel Hill
Abstract ID: BAPS.2016.MAR.F4.2
Abstract: F4.00002 : From chromosome crumpling to the interacting randomly branched polymers
11:51 AM–12:27 PM
Preview Abstract
Abstract
Author:
Ralf Everaers
(Laboratoire de Physique, ENS de Lyon)
The conformational statistics of ring polymers in melts or dense solutions
is strongly affected by their quenched microscopic topological state. The
effect is particularly strong for non-concatenated unknotted rings, which
are known to crumple and segregate and which have been implicated as models
for the generic behavior of interphase chromosomes. In [1] we have used a
computationally efficient multi-scale approach to identify the subtle
physics underlying their behavior, where we combine massive Molecular
Dynamics simulations on the fiber level with Monte Carlo simulations of a
wide range of lattice models for the large scale structure. This allowed us
to show that ring melts can be \textit{quantitatively} mapped to coarse-grained melts of
\textit{interacting} randomly branched primitive paths.
To elucidate the behavior of interacting branched polymers, we use a
combination of scaling arguments and computer simulations[2]. The
simulations are carried out for different statistical ensembles: ideal
randomly branching polymers, melts of interacting randomly branching
polymers, and self-avoiding trees with annealed and quenched connectivities.
In all cases, we perform a detailed analysis of the tree connectivities and
conformations. We find that the scaling behaviour of average properties is
very well described by the Flory theory of Gutin et al. [Macromolecules 26,
1293 (1993)]. A detailed study of the corresponding distribution functions
allows us to propose a coherent framework of the behavior of interacting
trees, including generalised Fisher-Pincus relationships and the detailed
analysis of contacts statistics.
[1] Ring Polymers in the Melt State: The Physics of Crumpling, Angelo Rosa
and Ralf Everaers, Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 118302 (2014) \newline
[2] Conformations of randomly branching polymers with volume interactions,
Angelo Rosa, A.Y. Grosberg, M. Rubinstein and Ralf Everaers, in preparation.
To cite this abstract, use the following reference: http://meetings.aps.org/link/BAPS.2016.MAR.F4.2