Dresden 2026 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 40: Statistical Physics of Biological Systems II (joint session DY/BP)

DY 40.2: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 11. März 2026, 15:30–15:45, ZEU/0114

A freely jointed chain with two-state hinges — •Minsu Yi and Panayotis Benetatos — Department of Physics, Kyungpook National University, Daegu, South Korea

We discuss aspects of the stretching and bending elasticity of a freely jointed chain, where the hinges can be open or closed in a random fashion. This two-state-hinge model captures a specific degree of freedom associated with the local bending stiffness of the polymer, and its variation can be due to internal changes or to the attachment of ligands from the environment. In this presentation, we focus on comparing the effects of two different types of disorder on the hinges: annealed (reversible Freely Jointed Chain, rFJC) or quenched (quenched Freely Jointed Chain, qFJC). It turns out that, as expected, those different types of disorder yield qualitatively different behaviors. For finite-size systems, we obtain a recurrence relation, which allows us to calculate the exact force-extension relation numerically for an arbitrary size of the system for both systems. In the thermodynamic limit, when the contour length is much larger than the persistence length, we obtain an exact expression for the force-extension relation. The difference between the two systems still exists in the thermodynamic limit.

[1] M. Yi, D. Lee and P. Benetatos, J. Chem. Phys. 161 (23): 234908 (2024)

[2] M. Yi and P. Benetatos, J. Stat. Mech. 073501 (2025)

Keywords: semiflexible polymers; disorder (annealed, quenched); elasticity; freely jointed chain