2001/11/30 by Peter Grassberger, Hsiao-Ping Hsu, Hsiao‐Ping Hsu
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Force Microscopy Techniques and Applications #Material Dynamics and Properties #Theoretical and Computational Physics #cond-mat.soft #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.65.031807
published as Phys. Rev. E65, 031807 (2002) · 10 pages, 16 figures
arxiv created 2002/01/29 · openalex publication_date 2002/03/07 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Stretched polymers with attractive interaction are studied in two and three dimensions. They are described by biased self-avoiding random walks with nearest-neighbor attraction. The bias corresponds to opposite forces applied to the first and last monomers. We show that both in d=2 and d=3 a phase transition occurs as this force is increased beyond a critical value, where the polymer changes from a collapsed globule to a stretched configuration. This transition is second order in d=2 and first order in d=3. For d=2 we predict the transition point quantitatively from properties of the unstretched polymer. This is not possible in d=3, but even there we can estimate the transition point precisely, and we can study the scaling at temperatures slightly below the collapse temperature of the unstretched polymer. We find very large finite size corrections that would make very difficult the estimate of the transition point from straightforward simulations.