2000/06/12 by G. Srinivas, Goundla Srinivas, Anand Yethiraj +6
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Fuel Cells and Related Materials #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.cond-mat/0006198
12 pages, 8 figurers, abstract modified, typos corrected, submitted to Physchemcomm
openalex publication_date 2000/06/12 · arxiv created 2000/06/28 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Long distance excitation energy transfer between a donor and an acceptor embedded in a polymer chain is usually assumed to occur via the Forster mechanism which predicts a 1/R6 distance dependence of the transfer rate, where R is the distance between the donor and the acceptor. In solution R fluctuates with time. In this work, a Brownian dynamics simulation of a polymer chain with Forster enregy transfer between the two ends is carried out and the time dependence of the survival probability Sp(t) is obtained. The latter can be measured by the flourescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) technique, which is now widely used to study conformations of biopolymers via the single molecule spectroscopy. It is found that the suvival probability is exponential-like when the Forster radius (RF) is comparable to the root mean square radius(L) of the polymer chain. The decay is strongly non-exponential both for small and large (RF), and also for large kF. Large deviations from Wilemski-Fixman theory is obtained when RF is significantly differnet from L.