Statistical Mechanics of Semiflexible Polymers: Theory and Experiment

TL;DR

This paper reviews the physical properties, theoretical models, and experimental findings related to semiflexible polymers like actin, focusing on their conformational statistics, mechanical response, and network elasticity.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis combining theory and experiment on the mechanics and dynamics of semiflexible polymer networks, including recent experimental comparisons.

Findings

Conformational statistics of semiflexible polymers are characterized.

Mechanical response and force-extension relations are detailed.

Elasticity transition in crosslinked networks is analyzed.

Abstract

We review the physical properties of macromolecular networks, consisting of semiflexible polymers such as actin. We start by giving a theoretical analysis of the conformational statistics and mechanical response of single filaments. Experimentally relevant quantities such as the end-to-end distribution function and the force-extension relation are discussed. The results are used to analyze the elastic modulus of an entangled solution of such objects. We also discuss the short time and long time (terminal regime) dynamics and compare our results with recent dynamic light scattering and viscoelastic measurements. Furthermore, we analyze the elasticity transition in stochastic models of crosslinked networks.