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Published on: October 25, 2017
Tension dynamics in semiflexible polymers. I. Coarse-grained equations of motion
Oskar Hallatschek1, Erwin Frey, Klaus Kroy
1Lyman Laboratory of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA. ohallats@fas.harvard.edu
Abstract:
Based on the wormlike chain model, a coarse-grained description of the nonlinear dynamics of a weakly bending semiflexible polymer is developed. By means of a multiple-scale perturbation analysis, a length-scale separation inherent to the weakly bending limit is exploited to reveal the deterministic nature of the spatio temporal relaxation of the backbone tension and to deduce the corresponding coarse-grained equation of motion. From this partial integro-differential equation, some detailed analytical predictions for the nonlinear response of a weakly bending polymer are derived in an accompanying paper [O. Hallatschek, following paper, Phys. Rev. E 75, 031906 (2007)].
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