Confinement-driven translocation of a flexible polymer

TL;DR

This paper investigates how a flexible polymer escapes from confinement, revealing a nonlinear scaling law for translocation time that depends on polymer length and geometry, challenging previous models.

Contribution

It introduces a new scaling law for polymer translocation time that accounts for confinement geometry, supported by simulation results.

Findings

Translocation time scales nonlinearly with polymer length.

The scaling law depends on the confining geometry.

Results align with recent free energy confinement models.

Abstract

We consider the escape of a flexible, self-avoiding polymer chain out of a confined geometry. By means of simulations, we demonstrate that the translocation time can be described by a simple scaling law that exhibits a nonlinear dependence on the degree of polymerization and that is sensitive to the nature of the confining geometry. These results contradict earlier predictions but are in agreement with recently confirmed geometry-dependent expressions for the free energy of confinement.