title: Annealed lattice animal model and Flory theory for the melt of non-concatenated rings: towards the physics of crumpling.
abstract: A Flory theory is constructed for a long polymer ring in a melt of unknotted and non-concatenated rings. The theory assumes that the ring forms an effective annealed branched object and computes its primitive path. It is shown that the primitive path follows self-avoiding statistics and is characterized by the corresponding Flory exponent of a polymer with excluded volume. Based on that, it is shown that rings in the melt are compact objects with overall size proportional to their length raised to the 1/3 power. Furthermore, the contact probability exponent γcontact is estimated, albeit by a poorly controlled approximation, with the result close to 1.1 consistent with both numerical and experimental data.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Center for Soft Matter Research, New York University, 4 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003, USA. ayg1@nyu.edu.
authors.forename: Alexander Y
authors.initials: AY
authors.lastname: Grosberg
mesh_terms: D002843:Chromatin / Q000737:chemistry*; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D058105:Polymerization
chemical_list: D002843:Chromatin