2010/09/12 by Florian Thüroff, Benedikt Obermayer, Erwin Frey · 17 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Engineering · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Cellular Mechanics and Interactions #Classical mechanics #Composite material #Computer science #Dynamics (music) #Force Microscopy Techniques and Applications #Geometry #Heuristic #Materials science #Mathematics #Mechanics #Nanopore and Nanochannel Transport Studies #Nonlinear system #Physics #Polymer #Relaxation (psychology) #Scaling #Scaling law #Statistical physics #Tension (geology) #cond-mat.soft #q-bio.BM
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.83.021802
published in Physical Review E 83(2), 021802 (American Physical Society) · 18 pages, 1 figure
arxiv created 2010/09/12 · openalex publication_date 2011/02/22 · arxiv updated 2011/02/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The longitudinal response of single semiflexible polymers to sudden changes in externally applied forces is known to be controlled by the propagation and relaxation of backbone tension. Under many experimental circumstances, realized, for example, in nanofluidic devices or in polymeric networks or solutions, these polymers are effectively confined in a channel- or tubelike geometry. By means of heuristic scaling laws and rigorous analytical theory, we analyze the tension dynamics of confined semiflexible polymers for various generic experimental setups. It turns out that in contrast to the well-known linear response, the influence of confinement on the nonlinear dynamics can largely be described as that of an effective prestress. We also study the free relaxation of an initially confined chain, finding a surprising superlinear ~t(9/8) growth law for the change in end-to-end distance at short times.