A an international team of researchers led by CS faculty A. Onuriev proposed a general mechanism of strong stretching of polymers. When stretching of individual units (monomers) of the polymer is described by a convex energy-extension curve, the entire polymer chain extends uniformly in response to the pulling force. In contrast, when the energy-extension function is non-convex, the stretched polymer consists of two distinct phases. Some biological polymers such as the DNA exhibit this type of two-phase stretching, which leads to many peculiar phenomena such as the existence of a regime in which further extension of the polymer proceeds without increase in the pulling force. The work is now published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA.
Images and Vis courtesy of Virginia Tech Research Computing: Nicholas Polys, Andrew Wood, Alexey Onufriev