Self-Avoiding Flexible Polymers under Spherical Confinement
- 24 January 2006
- journal article
- Published by American Chemical Society (ACS) in Nano Letters
- Vol. 6 (5) , 901-905
- https://doi.org/10.1021/nl052351n
Abstract
We compute the free energy of confinement for a flexible self-avoiding polymer inside a spherical cavity. Accurate numerical results allow us to arbitrate between three competing scaling predictions. For moderate confinement, the free energy exhibits a power-law dependence on cavity size that is different from what is observed for planar and cylindrical confinement. At high monomer concentrations, crossover to a different scaling regime is observed, consistent with the screening of the excluded-volume interactions. We demonstrate how our findings lead to a revised prediction for the escape time of a polymer from a spherical confinement.Keywords
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