Universal scaling of conformations of tangentially driven ring polymers

Abstract

The interplay of tangential activity and excluded-volume interactions in ring polymers adsorbed to a surface, consistently results in the overall swelling of the ring configurations. This is in strong contrast to the case for three dimensional linear and ring polymers, where activity induces frequently collapsed structures. By means of Brownian Dynamic simulations, we investigate how the scaling properties of such active rings can be universally characterized by an activity-dependent Flory exponent, as a generalization of the equilibrium behavior. At high activity, an effective persistence length characterizes the conformations of active flexible rings.