Elasticity of a Freely Jointed Chain with Quenched Disorder

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yi, Minsu, Benetatos, Panayotis
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Yi, Minsu
Benetatos, Panayotis
author_facet Yi, Minsu
Benetatos, Panayotis
contents We introduce a simple theoretical model, the Freely Jointed Chain with quenched hinges (qFJC), which captures the quenched disorder in the local bending stiffness of the polymer. In this article, we analyze the tensile elasticity of the qFJC in the Gibbs (fixed-force) ensemble. For finite-size systems, we obtain a recurrence relation of the exact free energy, which allows us to calculate the exact force-extension relation numerically for an arbitrary size of the system. In the thermodynamic limit, when $L({\rm contour \;length})\gg L_p({\rm persistence \;length})$, we obtain a framework to deal with quenched disorder in the polymer configuration. This allows us to obtain the response function for the discrete and continuous qFJC in the thermodynamic limit. It turns out that the extension of the continuous qFJC can be cast in a simple form. Furthermore, we have applied our analysis to rod-coil multiblock copolymers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_14817
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Elasticity of a Freely Jointed Chain with Quenched Disorder
Yi, Minsu
Benetatos, Panayotis
Soft Condensed Matter
Statistical Mechanics
Biological Physics
We introduce a simple theoretical model, the Freely Jointed Chain with quenched hinges (qFJC), which captures the quenched disorder in the local bending stiffness of the polymer. In this article, we analyze the tensile elasticity of the qFJC in the Gibbs (fixed-force) ensemble. For finite-size systems, we obtain a recurrence relation of the exact free energy, which allows us to calculate the exact force-extension relation numerically for an arbitrary size of the system. In the thermodynamic limit, when $L({\rm contour \;length})\gg L_p({\rm persistence \;length})$, we obtain a framework to deal with quenched disorder in the polymer configuration. This allows us to obtain the response function for the discrete and continuous qFJC in the thermodynamic limit. It turns out that the extension of the continuous qFJC can be cast in a simple form. Furthermore, we have applied our analysis to rod-coil multiblock copolymers.
title Elasticity of a Freely Jointed Chain with Quenched Disorder
topic Soft Condensed Matter
Statistical Mechanics
Biological Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14817