Role of temperature and alignment activity on kinetics of coil-globule transition of a flexible polymer

TL;DR

This study investigates how temperature and active bead alignment influence the non-equilibrium coil-globule transition kinetics of a flexible polymer, revealing that higher activity levels significantly alter collapse behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a molecular dynamics simulation approach to analyze the combined effects of activity and temperature on polymer collapse kinetics, highlighting the impact of active bead alignment.

Findings

Higher activity levels cause noticeable differences in collapse kinetics.

Lower activity maintains similar kinetics across temperatures.

Temperature effects become prominent at high activity levels.

Abstract

We study the nonequilibrium kinetics during the coil-globule transition of a flexible polymer chain with active beads after a quench from good to poor solvent condition using molecular dynamics simulation. Activity for each bead is introduced via the well-known Vicsek-like alignment rule due to which the velocity of a bead tries to align towards the average direction of its neighbors. We investigate the role of quenching temperature with varying activity during collapse of this polymer. We find that although for lower activities the kinetics remains qualitatively similar for different temperatures, for higher activity noticeable differences can be identified.