Helical Structures from an Isotropic Homopolymer Model

Abstract

Abstract We present Monte Carlo simulation results for square-well homopolymers at a series of bond lengths. Although the model contains only isotropic pairwise interactions, under appropriate conditions this system shows spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, where the chain exists in either a left-or a right-handed helical structure. We investigate how this behavior depends upon the ratio between bond length and monomer radius.

Publication
In Physical review letters
Date