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. 2005 Sep;72(3 Pt 1):030801.
doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.72.030801. Epub 2005 Sep 7.

Bimodality in the transverse fluctuations of a grafted semiflexible polymer and the diffusion-convection analogue: an effective-medium approach

P Benetatos  1 , T Munk, E Frey
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Bimodality in the transverse fluctuations of a grafted semiflexible polymer and the diffusion-convection analogue: an effective-medium approach

P Benetatos et al. Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2005 Sep.

Abstract

Recent Monte Carlo simulations of a grafted semiflexible polymer in 1+1 dimensions have revealed a pronounced bimodal structure in the probability distribution of the transverse (bending) fluctuations of the free end, when the total contour length is of the order of the persistence length [G. Lattanzi, Phys. Rev E 69, 021801 (2004)]. In this paper, we show that the emergence of bimodality is related to a similar behavior observed when a random walker is driven in the transverse direction by a certain type of shear flow. We adapt an effective-medium argument, which was first introduced in the context of the sheared random-walk problem [E. Ben-Naim, Phys. Rev. A 45, 7207 (1992)], in order to obtain a simple analytic approximation of the probability distribution of the free-end fluctuations. We show that this approximation captures the bimodality and most of the qualitative features of the free-end fluctuations. We also predict that relaxing the local inextensibility constraint of the wormlike chain could lead to the disappearance of bimodality.

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