J Arsuaga et al 2009 J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 42 465202 doi:10.1088/1751-8113/42/46/465202
J Arsuaga1,3, B Borgo1, Y Diao2,3 and R Scharein1
Show affiliationsThe physical and biological properties of collapsed long polymer chains as well as of highly condensed biopolymers (such as DNA in all organisms) are known to be determined, at least in part, by their topological and geometrical properties. With this purpose of characterizing the topological properties of such condensed systems equilateral random polygons restricted to confined volumes are often used. However, very few analytical results are known. In this paper, we investigate the effect of volume confinement on the mean average crossing number (ACN) of equilateral random polygons. The mean ACN of knots and links under confinement provides a simple alternative measurement for the topological complexity of knots and links in the statistical sense. For an equilateral random polygon of n segments without any volume confinement constrain, it is known that its mean ACN
ACN
is of the order
. Here we model the confining volume as a simple sphere of radius R. We provide an analytical argument which shows that
ACN
of an equilateral random polygon of n segments under extreme confinement (meaning R
n) grows as O(n2). We propose to model the growth of
ACN
as a(R)n2 + b(R)nln(n) under a less-extreme confinement condition, where a(R) and b(R) are functions of R with R being the radius of the confining sphere. Computer simulations performed show a fairly good fit using this model.
Issue 46 (20 November 2009)
Received 30 July 2009, in final form 25 September 2009
Published 22 October 2009
J Arsuaga et al 2009 J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 42 465202
Benfang He et al 2007 Nanotechnology 18 365602
T Okamoto et al 2009 J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 191 012004
F Acernese et al 2008 Class. Quantum Grav. 25 184003
Thomas Curtright and Cosmas Zachos 2009 J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 42 485208
Mariano A Zimmler et al 2007 Nanotechnology 18 395201
D Sztenkiel and R Świrkowicz 2007 J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 19 256205
Preeti Parashar and Swapan Rana 2009 J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 42 462003
Sergey M Sergeev 2009 J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 42 295207
E Janik et al 2007 Nanotechnology 18 475606