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Updated: Aug 15, 2026

Flexural Rigidity Measurements of Biopolymers Using Gliding Assays
Published on: November 9, 2012
Semiflexible polymer on an anisotropic Bethe lattice
Stilck1, Cordeiro, do Amaral RL
1Instituto de Fisica, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Abstract:
The mean-square end-to-end distance of an N-step polymer on a Bethe lattice is calculated. We consider semiflexible polymers placed on isotropic and anisotropic lattices. The distance on the Cayley tree is defined by embedding the tree on a sufficiently high-dimensional Euclidean space, considering that every bend of the polymer defines a direction orthogonal to all the previous ones. In the isotropic case, the result obtained for the mean-square end-to-end distance turns out to be identical to the one obtained for ideal chains without immediate returns on an hypercubic lattice with the same coordination number of the Bethe lattice. For the general case, we obtain asymptotic behavior in both the semiflexible and almost rigid limits.
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