EPJ B Colloquium - Understanding nonequilibrium scaling laws governing collapse of a polymer

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Published on 03 September 2020

Recent emerging interest in experiments of single-polymer dynamics have encouraged computational physicists to revive their understanding of these phenomena, particularly in the nonequilibrium context. In a Colloquium recently published in EPJB, authors from Institut für Theoretische Physik at the University of Leipzig discuss the currently evolving approaches of investigating the evolution dynamics of homopolymer collapse using computer simulations.

The primary focus of these approaches is to understand various dynamical scaling laws related to coarsening and aging during the collapse in space dimension d = 3, using tools popular in nonequilibrium coarsening dynamics of particle or spin systems. In addition to providing an overview of those results, they also present some preliminary results on the special case of polymer collapse kinetics in space dimension d = 2, and conclude with a discussion and an outlook to future research in this direction.