Program

O.6 -- Oral, NCTP-42

Date: Monday, 31 July 2017

Time: 14h20 - 14h40

Folding of thick ribbons in a bad solvent

Thanh-Son Nguyen (1,2), Jayanth R. Banavar (3), Amos Maritan (4), and Trinh Xuan Hoang (1)

(1) Institute of Physics, Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam; (2) Liquid Crystal Institute, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, USA; (3) University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA; (4) University of Padova, Padova, Italy

Ribbons are intermediate between membranes/surfaces and polymers. They are important class of objects found in everyday life, in biology and nanotechnology. In this work, we study the folding of a thick and stiff ribbon in a poor solvent by using both exact arguments and Monte Carlo simulations. We find a rich phase diagram which reflects the dual characters of a ribbon with analogues to both polymers and membranes. The emergent conformations in this phase diagram include rolled (or Archimedian spiral), curled, twisted and globular conformations. The rolled and the curled conformations are akin to those of a membrane like a rolled carpet, whereas the globular conformation is similar to a compact polymer. Interestingly, both the ribbon thickness and the solvent molecule size are shown to moderate these dual characters. As an application, we show how our simple model of hydrophobic thick ribbon can be tailored to explain the formation of the celebrated DNA double helix structure.

Presenter: Trịnh Xuân Hoàng