Confined chiral polymer nematics: ordering and spontaneous condensation
Abstract
We investigate condensation of a long confined chiral nematic polymer inside a spherical enclosure, mimicking condensation of DNA inside a viral capsid. The Landau-de Gennes nematic free energy Ansatz appropriate for nematic polymers allows us to study the condensation process in detail with different boundary conditions at the enclosing wall that simulate repulsive and attractive polymer-surface interactions. Increasing the chirality, we observe a transformation of the toroidal condensate into a closed surface with an increasing genus, akin to the ordered domain formation observed in cryo-microscopy of bacteriophages.
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