Radius of gyration, contraction factors, and subdivisions of topological polymers

Abstract

We consider the topologically constrained random walk model for topological polymers. In this model, the polymer forms an arbitrary graph whose edges are selected from an appropriate multivariate Gaussian which takes into account the constraints imposed by the graph type. We recover the result that the expected radius of gyration can be given exactly in terms of the Kirchhoff index of the graph. We then consider the expected radius of gyration of a topological polymer whose edges are subdivided into n pieces. We prove that the contraction factor of a subdivided polymer approaches a limit as the number of subdivisions increases, and compute the limit exactly in terms of the degree-Kirchhoff index of the original graph. This limit corresponds to the thermodynamic limit in statistical mechanics and is fundamental in the physics of topological polymers. Furthermore, these asymptotic contraction factors are shown to fit well with molecular dynamics simulations, which should be useful for predicting the g-factors of topological polymer models with excluded volume.