Effects of interaction between nanopore and polymer on translocation time

TL;DR

This study uses molecular dynamics simulations to analyze how nanopore-polymer interactions affect translocation time, revealing dependencies on pore size, binding energy, and initial conditions, with results aligning with previous scaling laws.

Contribution

It provides new insights into how interaction energy and initial conditions influence polymer translocation times in nanopores, supported by detailed MD simulations.

Findings

Translocation time increases with binding energy and pore diameter.

Scaling exponent of force versus time is approximately -0.9531.

Translocation time is highly sensitive to initial polymer conditions.

Abstract

Here using LAMMPS molecular dynamics (MD) software, we simulate polymer translocation in 2 dimensions. We do the simulations for weak and moderate forces and for different pore diameters. Our results show that in both non-equilibrium and equilibrium initial conditions, translocation time will always increase by increasing binding energy and or increasing pore diameter. Moreover, scaling exponent of time versus force is -0.9531 in accordance to our predecessors. The comparison between equilibrium and non-equilibrium initial condition shows that the translocation time is very sensitive to the initial condition. Translocation time of the relaxed polymers for interaction energy of 8k_B T is smaller from the non-equilibrium case even in the small energy of 1k_B T.