Small-world networks and the conformation space of a short lattice polymer chain

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2001 EDP Sciences
, , Citation A. Scala et al 2001 EPL 55 594 DOI 10.1209/epl/i2001-00457-7

0295-5075/55/4/594

Abstract

We map the conformation space of a short lattice polymer chain to a network, where i) the vertices of the network have a one-to-one correspondence to the conformations of the chain, and ii) a link between two vertices indicates the possibility of switching from one conformation to the other by a single Monte Carlo move of the chain. We find that the geometric properties of this network are similar to those of small-world networks, namely, the diameter of conformation space increases, for large networks, as the logarithm of the number of conformations, while locally the network appears to have low dimensionality.

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