Ring polymers in the melt state: the physics of crumpling

Abstract

The conformational statistics of ring polymers in melts or dense solutions is strongly affected by their quenched microscopic topological state. The effect is particularly strong for non-concatenated unknotted rings, which are known to crumple and segregate and which have been implicated as models for the generic behavior of interphase chromosomes. Here we use a computationally efficient multi-scale approach to show that melts of rings of total contour length $L_r$ can be {\it quantitatively} mapped onto melts of {\em interacting} lattice trees with gyration radii $\langle R_g^2(L_r) \rangle \propto L_r^{2\nu}$ and $\nu=0.32\pm0.01$.