Microcanonical Inflection-Point Analysis of Phases for Semiflexible Polymers

We study a generic model of semiflexible polymer with self-interactions, which is known to exhibit a multitude of structural phases. Previous studies employing canonical statistical analysis methods for the identification and characterization of these phases have been inconclusive as these approaches lead to inconsistent results for systems of finite size. For our study, we use the recently introduced generalized microcanonical inflection-point analysis method [1]. This analysis technique was developed to enable the systematic identification and classification of transitions in systems of any size. In this talk, we discuss the structural hyperphase diagram of semiflexible polymers in the range of comparatively large bending stiffness, which extends a previous case study [2]. Extensive replica-exchange Monte Carlo simulations were performed to obtain accurate estimates of the microcanonical entropies for the different values of the bending stiffness.

References

[1] K. Qi and M. Bachmann, Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 180601 (2018).

[2] D. Aierken and M. Bachmann, Polymers 12, 3013 (2020).