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Effect of bending rigidity on the knotting of a polymer under tension (1211.1879v2)
Published 8 Nov 2012 in cond-mat.soft and q-bio.BM
Abstract: A coarse-grained computational model is used to investigate how the bending rigidity of a polymer under tension affects the formation of a trefoil knot. Thermodynamic integration techniques are applied to demonstrate that the free-energy cost of forming a knot has a minimum at non-zero bending rigidity. The position of the minimum exhibits a power-law dependence on the applied tension. For knotted polymers with non-uniform bending rigidity, the knots preferentially localize in the region with a bending rigidity that minimizes the free-energy.
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