"Cracking-the-whip" effect stretches driven polymers

Abstract

Cracking the whip accelerates the tail of a chain to hit the air loudly and clearly. We proved that the similar acceleration effect causes coil deformation of driven chain-like polymers. We first preformed Monte Carlo simulations of a single driven polymer coil to demonstrate its deformation in company with faster or slower deviations of velocities. We then performed parallel Brownian Dynamics simulations to demonstrate that the coil deformation can be caused by the so-called "cracking-the-whip" effect due to non-synchronous biased Brownian motions of monomers inherited in Monte Carlo simulations. Since such non-synchronous motions represent random perturbations in the environmentally dependent potential energy landscape or mobility, reflecting heterogeneous dynamics of polymers in the liquid phase, our observations bring new insights into the non-linear dynamics of driven chain-like polymers.