Abstract
We study the link between three seeming-disparate cases of self-avoiding polymers: strongly overlapping multiple chains in dilute solution, chains under spherical confinement, and the onset of semidilute solutions. Our main result is that the free energy for overlapping chains is independent of chain length and scales as , slowly crossing over to , as increases. For strongly confined polymers inside a spherical cavity, we show that rearranging the chains does not cost an additional free energy. Our results imply that, during cell cycle, global reorganization of eukaryotic chromosomes in a large cell nucleus could be readily achieved.
- Received 3 November 2006
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.98.128303
©2007 American Physical Society