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Published on: October 25, 2017
Evidence for the extended de Gennes regime of a semiflexible polymer in slit confinement
Guo Kang Cheong1, Xiaolan Li1, Kevin D Dorfman1
1Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, 421 Washington Avenue SE, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA.
Abstract:
We use off-lattice, pruned-enriched Rosenbluth method (PERM) simulations to compute the confinement free energy of a real wormlike chain of effective width w and persistence length lp in a slit of height H. For slit heights much larger than the persistence length of the polymer and much smaller than the thermal blob size, the excess free energy of the confined chain is consistent with a modified version of the scaling theory for the extended de Gennes regime in a channel that reflects the blob statistics in slit confinement. Explicitly, for channel sizes [Formula: see text], the difference between the confinement free energy of the real chain and that of an ideal chain scales like w/H.
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