Polymer translocation induced by adsorption

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Abstract
We study the translocation of a flexible polymer through a pore in a membrane induced by its adsorption on the trans side of the membrane. When temperature T is higher than T c , the adsorption–desorption transition temperature, the attractive interaction between polymer and membrane plays little role in affecting polymer conformation, leading to translocation time that scales as τ∼L 3 , where L is the polymer contour length. When T<T c , however, the translocation time undergoes a sharp crossover to τ∼L 2 for sufficiently long polymers, following the second-order conformational (adsorption) transition. The translocation time is found to exhibit the crossover around T=T c ′ , which is lower than T c for polymers shorter than a critical length (N<N c ).
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