Berlin 2024 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 3: Active Matter I (joint session BP/CPP/DY)
BP 3.6: Vortrag
Montag, 18. März 2024, 10:45–11:00, H 1028
Giant Activity-Induced Stress Plateau in Entangled Polymer Solutions — Davide Breoni1, Christina Kurzthaler2, Benno Liebchen3, Hartmut Löwen2, and •Suvendu Mandal3 — 1Institut für Theoretische Physik II: Weiche Materie, Heinrich Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Universitätsstraße 1, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany — 2Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Nöhnitzer Straße 38, 01187 Dresden, Germany — 3Technische Universität Darmstadt, Karolinenplatz 5, 64289 Darmstadt, Germany
Highly entangled active polymer solutions play vital roles in various biological processes, spanning from the intricate mechanisms of cell mitosis to the regulation of genetic transcription. We study the viscoelastic properties of highly entangled, flexible, self-propelled polymers using Brownian dynamics simulations. Our results show that the active motion of the polymer increases the height of the stress plateau by orders of magnitude due to the emergence of grip forces at entanglement points. Identifying the activity-induced energy of a single polymer and the ratio of polymer length to self-propulsion velocity as relevant energy and time scales, we find the stress autocorrelation functions collapse across Peclet numbers [1]. We predict that the long-time viscosity scales with polymer length squared, in contrast to equilibrium counterparts that scale with the cube of the polymer length [1]. These insights offer prospects for designing new materials with activity-responsive mechanical properties.
[1] D. Breoni, C. Kurzthaler, B. Liebchen, H. Löwen, and S. Mandal, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2310.02929
Keywords: Active Polymers; Polymer entanglement; Statistical physics; Mechanical properties