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Inertia and activity: spiral transitions in semi-flexible, self-avoiding polymers.

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Area of Science:

  • Soft Matter Physics
  • Polymer Dynamics
  • Statistical Mechanics

Background:

  • Self-avoiding polymers exhibit complex behaviors influenced by activity and inertia.
  • Understanding transitions between different polymer conformations is crucial for materials science.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the dynamical re-entrant transition in a 2D, tangentially active, semi-flexible polymer.
  • To map the phase diagram of polymer structures in the activity-inertia plane.
  • To analyze the impact of activity and inertia on polymer size, shape, and equilibrium divergence.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized probability distributions of the turning number to determine structural stability.
  • Analyzed end-to-end distance distribution and radius of gyration tensor for size and shape.
  • Calculated Kullback-Leibler divergence to quantify deviation from equilibrium distributions.

Main Results:

  • Identified a transition from motile open chains to spinning achiral spirals with increasing activity.
  • Spiral formation at low activity is torque-balanced and inertia-independent; higher activity leads to inertial destabilization.
  • Kullback-Leibler divergence shows a non-monotonic relation with activity, peaking at compact spirals, and decreases with increasing inertia.

Conclusions:

  • The study presents a detailed phase diagram for polymer behavior under varying activity and inertia.
  • Inertia significantly influences spiral destabilization at higher activity levels, a phenomenon absent in the overdamped limit.
  • Polymer's deviation from equilibrium is linked to its compactness and spinning persistence, modulated by inertia.