Grand-canonical solution of semi-flexible self-avoiding trails on the Bethe lattice

TL;DR

This paper analytically solves a semi-flexible self-avoiding trail model on a Bethe lattice, revealing four distinct phases and complex phase transition behaviors relevant to polymer collapse and stiffness effects.

Contribution

It provides the first grand-canonical solution of semi-flexible self-avoiding trails on a Bethe lattice, identifying multiple phases and detailed transition mechanisms.

Findings

Four phases: NP, P, DP, AN, with AN only for stiff chains.

Critical transition surfaces and bicritical points are characterized.

In the rigid limit, the P phase disappears, revealing a triple point.

Abstract

We consider a model of semi-flexible interacting self-avoiding trails (sISAT's) on a lattice, where the walks are constrained to visit each lattice edge at most once. Such models have been studied as an alternative to the self-attracting self-avoiding walks (SASAW) to investigate the collapse transition of polymers, with the attractive interactions being on site, as opposed to nearest-neighbor interactions in SASAW. The grand-canonical version of the sISAT model is solved on a four-coordinated Bethe lattice, and four phases appear: non-polymerized (NP), regular polymerized (P), dense polymerized (DP) and anisotropic nematic (AN), the last one present in the phase diagram only for sufficiently stiff chains. The last two phases are dense, in the sense that all lattice sites are visited once in AN phase and twice in DP phase. In general, critical NP-P and DP-P transition surfaces meet with a NP-DP coexistence surface at a line of bicritical points. The region in which the AN phase is stable is limited by a discontinuous critical transition to the P phase, and we study this somewhat unusual transition in some detail. In the limit of rods, where the chains are totally rigid, the P phase is absent and the three coexistence lines (NP-AN, AN-DP, and NP-DP) meet at a triple point, which is the endpoint of the bicritical line.