D. Marenduzzo, C. Micheletti, H. Seyed-allaei, A. Trovato and A. Maritan
Continuum model for polymers with finite thickness
J. Phys. A. 38 L277-L283 (2005)
Link to online article.
ABSTRACT
We consider the continuum limit of a recently introduced model for
discretized thick polymers, or tubes. We address both analytically and
numerically how the polymer thickness influences the decay of
tangent-tangent correlations and find how the persistence length
scales with the thickness and the torsional rigidity of the tube
centreline. At variance with the worm-like chain model, the phase
diagram that we obtain for a continuous tube is richer; in particular,
for a given polymer thickness there exists a threshold value for the
centreline torsional rigidity separating a simple exponential decay of
the tangent-tangent correlation from an oscillatory one.