On the existence of helical structures during the collapse of flexible homopolymers: A Wang-Landau study

2011/01/26 by Sid Ahmed Sabeur, Sabeur, Sid Ahmed, Mounira Bouarkat +4
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Mathematical Theories and Applications #FOS: Physical sciences #Material Dynamics and Properties #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft) #Sports Dynamics and Biomechanics #cond-mat.soft

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1101.5129

5 pages, 3 figures

arxiv created 2011/01/26 · openalex publication_date 2011/01/26 · arxiv updated 2011/01/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

In this work, we report our results on the phase transition of a flexible homopolymer from a stretched chain to a compact globule. The Wang-landau method is used to study the thermodynamic properties of a the chain up to 512 monomers. We believe that the peak in the specific heat at low temperature T≈ 0.05 for small chain sizes N<100 is a clear evidence of the existence of metastable helical structures observed in a previous study.

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