Cyclization of a Polymer: A First Passage Problem for a Non-Markovian Process

Abstract

We discuss a problem of cyclization of a polymer molecule, which is an important example of reaction in a system showing strongly non-Markovian behavior on the timescales of interest. We show that the knowledge of the joint three-time probability distribution of the end-to-end distance is sufficient for the full description of the cyclization kinetics, so that the survival probability follows rigorously as a solution of the Volterra integral equation. The corresponding kinetics can easily be evaluated numerically. We moreover discuss how do some well-known approximations appear from this exact scheme due to decoupling.