Regensburg 2004 – scientific programme
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AKB: Biologische Physik
AKB 50: Poster Session "Biological Physics"
AKB 50.43: Poster
Friday, March 12, 2004, 10:30–13:00, B
Depinning of weakly bending semiflexible polymers — •Panayotis Benetatos1 and Erwin Frey1,2 — 1Hahn-Meitner-Institut, Abteilung Theorie, Berlin — 2Fachbereich Physik, Freie Universitaet, Berlin
We present a simple theoretical model for the thermal depinning of a weakly bending semiflexible polymer in 1+1 dimensions. We consider a discrete sequence of pinning sites along the polymer contour. Each pinning site is characterized by a binding energy, a transverse width, and an angular width. We use the necklace model of phase transitions in quasi-one-dimensional systems and we obtain a phase transition in the thermodynamic limit where the density of pinning sites goes to infinity and the widths of a pinning site go to zero. This novel way to take the thermodynamic limit is consistent with the weakly bending approximation which is valid when the total contour length of the polymer is smaller than its persistence length. We also consider the depinning in 1+d dimensions.