Probing the Effect of Density on the Aggregation Temperature of Semi-flexible Polymers in Spherical Confinement

AbstractApplying parallel multicanonical simulations, we study the aggregation transition of finite semi-flexible polymers in dependence on the density, where we keep the polymer length fixed as a chemical property. A spherical confinement is imposed to constrain the translational entropy. We show that the competition between single-polymer collapse and many-polymer aggregation yields a lower temperature bound for the isolated chain approximation. For dilute semi-flexible polymers, we present entropic arguments that allow to relate the inverse aggregation temperature to the density of the uniform polymer system