Elastic Lattice Polymers

الأصل · EN

We study a model of "elastic" lattice polymer in which a fixed number of monomers m is hosted by a self-avoiding walk with fluctuating length l. We show that the stored length density ρₘ = 1 - <l>/m scales asymptotically for large m as ρₘ=ρ∞(1-θ/m +...), where θ is the polymer entropic exponent, so that θ can be determined from the analysis of ρₘ. We perform simulations for elastic lattice polymer loops with various sizes and knots, in which we measure ρₘ. The resulting estimates support the hypothesis that the exponent θ is determined only by the number of prime knots and not by their type. However, if knots are present, we observe strong corrections to scaling, which help to understand how an entropic competition between knots is affected by the finite length of the chain.