Persistence-Length Renormalization of Polymers in a Crowded Environment of Hard Disks

Abstract

The most conspicuous property of a semiflexible polymer is its persistence length, defined as the decay length of tangent correlations along its contour. Using an efficient stochastic growth algorithm to sample polymers embedded in a quenched two-dimensional hard-disk fluid, we find apparent wormlike chain statistics with a renormalized persistence length. We identify a universal form of the disorder renormalization that suggests itself as a quantitative measure of molecular crowding.

5 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in PRL: http://journals.aps.org/prl/accepted/3d074YaeH101ac59529b8205a75f28f8e542c2fab