title: All-or-none proteinlike folding transition of a flexible homopolymer chain.
abstract: Here we report a first-order all-or-none transition from an expanded coil to a compact crystallite for a flexible polymer chain. Wang-Landau sampling is used to construct the complete density of states for square-well chains up to length 256. Analysis within both the microcanonical and canonical ensembles shows a direct freezing transition for finite length chains with sufficiently short-range interactions. This type of transition is a distinctive feature of "one-step" protein folding and our findings demonstrate that a simple homopolymer model can exhibit protein-folding thermodynamics.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Hiram College, Hiram, Ohio 44234, USA.
authors.forename: Mark P
authors.initials: MP
authors.lastname: Taylor
authors.forename: Wolfgang
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Paul
authors.forename: Kurt
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Binder