Chain molecule deformation in a uniform flow —A computer experiment

¹ Department of Physics and Center for Materials Physics Pennsylvania State University, University Park - PA 16802, USA
² Department of Physics, Pusan National University - Pusan 609-735, Korea
³ Benjamin Levich Institute and Department of Physics City College of the City University of New York - New York, NY 10031, USA

Received: 10 July 2001
Accepted: 23 January 2002

Abstract

We investigate the stretching of a polymer in a uniform flow using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Our MD simulations represent an ab-initio experiment with no explicit assumption for the dynamics of a single chain except for using the generic Lennard-Jones and the FENE potentials. In spite of the modest length of our simulated chains, the qualitative features of experiments on DNA are reproduced and the predictions of a wormlike chain theory are found to hold, with the polymer molecule being free draining at large extensions.