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Updated: Jun 21, 2026

Synthesis of Cyclic Polymers and Characterization of Their Diffusive Motion in the Melt State at the Single Molecule Level
Published on: September 26, 2016
Graph theoretical analysis of the energy landscape of model polymers
Marco Baiesi1, Lorenzo Bongini, Lapo Casetti
1Dipartimento di Fisica and Centro Interdipartimentale per lo Studio delle Dinamiche Complesse (CSDC), Università di Firenze, via G. Sansone 1, 50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy.
Abstract:
In systems characterized by a rough potential-energy landscape, local energetic minima and saddles define a network of metastable states whose topology strongly influences the dynamics. Changes in temperature, causing the merging and splitting of metastable states, have nontrivial effects on such networks and must be taken into account. We do this by means of a recently proposed renormalization procedure. This method is applied to analyze the topology of the network of metastable states for different polypeptidic sequences in a minimalistic polymer model. A smaller spectral dimension emerges as a hallmark of stability of the global energy minimum and highlights a nonobvious link between dynamic and thermodynamic properties.
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