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Fabrication of Polymer Microspheres for Optical Resonator and Laser Applications
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Polymer ejection from strong spherical confinement.

J Piili1, R P Linna1

  • 1Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, P.O. Box 15400, FI-00076 Aalto, Finland.

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|January 15, 2016
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Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Polymer ejection from confined spaces is exponentially slower with more ejected monomers due to increasing free energy. This explains polymer dynamics during capsid expulsion through nanoscale pores.

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Area of Science:

  • Biophysics
  • Polymer Physics
  • Nanotechnology

Background:

  • Flexible polymers are often confined within biological or synthetic capsids.
  • Understanding polymer ejection dynamics is crucial for applications like drug delivery and viral assembly.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the ejection dynamics of a confined flexible polymer from a spherical capsid through a nanoscale pore.
  • To elucidate the relationship between polymer confinement, free energy, and ejection time.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized molecular dynamics simulations at unprecedentedly high initial monomer densities.
  • Measured the force exerted by the polymer at the pore during ejection.

Main Results:

  • Ejection time for individual monomers increases exponentially with the number of already ejected monomers.
  • Excess free energy due to confinement grows exponentially with the initial number of monomers, driving this dependence.
  • Ejection time scales linearly with polymer length, dominated by internal capsid pressure.

Conclusions:

  • The exponential increase in ejection time is linked to the rising free energy of confined polymers, analogous to Flory-Huggins theory predictions.
  • Finite-size effects in simulations, specifically polymer tail retraction, can lead to observed superlinear dependencies in ejection times.