Conformational and dynamical properties of semiflexible polymers in the presence of active noise

Abstract

In the presence of active noise, flexible and semiflexible polymers exhibit drastically different conformational and dy-namical features compared to the case of thermal (white) noise only. For a non-Markovian exponentially correlated temporal noise (colored noise), flexible polymers swell with increasing noise strength, whereas semiflexible polymers shrink first and, for larger noise strengths, swell similar to flexible polymers. Thereby, a suitable treatment of the finite polymer contour length is essential. The finite contour length implies a strong dependence of the polymer relaxation times on the noise strengths. We discuss the conformational and dynamical aspects in terms of an analytical model, adopting the continuous Gaussian semiflexible polymer description. Moreover, results of computer simulations are shown and compared with analytical results.