Statistical properties of a tangentially driven active filament

TL;DR

This paper introduces an exact analytical model for active semiflexible polymers, enabling detailed study of their configurational and dynamical properties across different rigidity levels, with implications for understanding biological active systems.

Contribution

It maps a semiflexible polymer to an exactly solvable active Rouse chain, providing a new analytical approach to study active polymer dynamics.

Findings

Analytical expressions for configurational properties

Exact solutions for dynamical behavior

Applicability to various rigidity regimes

Abstract

Active polymers play a central role in many biological systems, from bacterial flagella to cellular cytoskeletons. Minimal models of semiflexible active filaments have been used to study a variety of interesting phenomena in active systems, such as defect dynamics in active nematics, clustering and laning in motility assays, and conformational properties of chromatin in eukaryotic cells. In this paper, we map a semiflexible polymer to an exactly solvable active Rouse chain, which enables us to analytically compute configurational and dynamical properties of active polymers with arbitrary rigidity.