Helical structures from an isotropic homopolymer model

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates through Monte Carlo simulations that isotropic homopolymer models can spontaneously form chiral helical structures, depending on bond length ratios, revealing new insights into polymer symmetry breaking.

Contribution

It shows that isotropic pairwise interactions in homopolymers can lead to spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking and helix formation, a novel finding in polymer physics.

Findings

Chiral symmetry breaking occurs in isotropic homopolymer models.

Helical structures depend on bond length to monomer radius ratio.

Spontaneous left- or right-handed helices form under certain conditions.

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.