Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-22-2004

Abstract

We present a mathematical approach to the worm-like chain model of semiflexible polymers. Our method is built on a novel generating function from which all the properties of the model can be derived. Moreover, this approach satisfies the local inextensibility constraint exactly. In this paper, we focus on the lowest order contribution to the generating function and derive explicit analytical expressions for the characteristic function, polymer propagator, single chain structure factor, and mean square end-to-end distance. These analytical expressions are valid for polymers with any degree of stiffness and contour length. We find that our calculations are able to capture the fully flexible and infinitely stiff limits of the aforementioned quantities exactly while providing a smooth and approximate crossover behavior for intermediate values of the stiffness of the polymer backbone. In addition, our results are in very good quantitative agreement with the exact and approximate results of five other treatments of semiflexible polymers. (C) 2004 American Institute of Physics.

Publication Title

Journal of Chemical Physics

Volume

121

Issue

12

First Page

6064

Last Page

6077

Required Publisher's Statement

Copyright 2004 American Institute of Physics. The original published version of this article may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.1784771.

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